Chris Hubbard

Recently, my wife’s computer started locking up when she would remote desktop to it from her laptop (both have Windows XP SP3 installed).  Last night I started diagnosing the problem. 

My first suspect was the video drivers.  Reinstalling the latest ATI Catalyst drivers didn’t help and uninstalling them left the system with only one monitor (it is a dual head setup).

Next I logged her out and logged in holding down the shift key which will keep startup items from running.  I also disabled anti virus software (Spyware Doctor with Antivirus).  In this configuration, I had a stable system that could remote desktop again!

I enabled anti virus software again and I had the locking up problem again.  It was time to look at the event log (which I should have done earlier) to see if there were any issues reported.  In the event log, there were 4 instances of the same error for 4 different services: sdCoreService, ShellHWDetection, PlugPlay, HidServ.

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    Service Control Manager
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    7011
Date:        10/25/2008
Time:        10:49:17 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    MICHELLEPC
Description:
Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the sdCoreService service.

There are also some warnings about a printer being purged, pending deletion, and deleted.  The default settings for Remote Desktop is to connect the client’s printers with the RDP server so that you can print from the server to the local printer.  This is a feature that I never use since all the machines at home have the printers locally configured.

I tried disabling "Intelliguard" in Spyware Doctor and I was back to it working again.  I had upgraded the version of Spyware Doctor with Anti Virus a little bit ago so that is probably was introduced the problem.  However, I didn’t really want to go down the path of trying to report the problem and having to work with a support organization (no matter how good they were) to resolve this issue. 

Instead, the warnings about printer drivers and PlugPlay service error lead me to try to disable sharing the printers when connecting with remote desktop (with Intelliguard enabled) and that worked as well!  So there seems to be some incompatibility with sdCoreService and PlugPlay when connecting with remote desktop.  I will pass this blog post on to PCTools and see if they can find out anything.  At least I can work around the incompatibility!