If you installed Windows XP SP3, thinking you’ll be ahead of the curve and check out the new features, enhanced security, etc., you’re not alone.

Lots of people, myself included, like to evaluate the latest technologies, updates, tweaks, etc., either for personal information, or perhaps to evaluate for a business-need.

Typically its advisable to not run RC (Release Candidate) code on mission critical machines, on the outside chance it might break something.  That’s good advice for most situations, but if you’re like me you install a service pack (even a release candidate) on a test machine, run it for a few days and see if everything is working.

If it all looks good, then I put it on my main workstation to get the increased security, performance, or whatever other benefits the service pack provides.  I don’t recall seeing anything in the general notes about the Release Candidate of XP SP3 stating that the RDP client would time bomb after a specific date.

Unfortunately, the RDP client XP SP3 RC1 is set to time-bomb, as many of us found last week.  The bad part about that situation is you can’t just download and reinstall the older client because it gives you and error stating the version you’re trying to install is older than the version on your system and won’t let you continue.

Depending on how you installed SP3 (slipstream vs. vanilla install) you may or may not be able to uninstall SP3.  If you can’t uninstall and you can’t reinstall, you’re in a bit of a bind if you routinely need to use RDP.

Fortunately I found a pretty easy work-around that had me up and running in no time.  Simply copy two files from another XP or Vista installation to your problem workstation.

The two files you’ll need are:

• mstsc.exe
• mstscax.dll

Copy those two files from the c:windowssystem32 of the other XP or Vista machine, and copy them to your c:windowssystem32 directory (or wherever you have windows installed) and you should be able to launch RDP again no problem.

Windows XP SP3 RC2 Refresh

Microsoft has just released XP SP3 RC2 Refresh, but you have to uninstall SP3 RC1 or any previous version before installing RC2.  So again, you may run into the same problem with not being able to uninstall depending on how to installed (some people slipstream, some people install without backing up the files being modified, etc).

Even if you can uninstall a previous version of SP3 and install SP3 RC2, that’s a lot of work to just get RDP working.  Copying over the two files listed above is a much quick solution.