In Windows Vista and Windows 7, the ability to have a PC act as a RDP server (host) is limited to the server SKUs and Ultimate. Windows Starter, Windows Home,

In Windows Vista and Windows 7, the ability to have a PC act as a RDP server (host) is limited to the server SKUs and Ultimate. Windows Starter, Windows Home, and Windows Home Premium do not have this feature (it's actually there, but requires a hack to enable). This was a business policy to help differentiate the Pro & Ultimate versions from the cheaper Home versions. When we were building Windows Home Server, I fought hard to get the policy of not supporting Remote Desktop (host) in Windows Vista/7 Home and Home Premium changed. We wanted to make it so that WHS could more easily enable people to connect into their home computers remotely via WHS, but the policy meant that only Windows Vista/7 Ultimate and Pro could act as a RDP host which severely limited the reach of this feature. It is probably a good thing (for MS) that I failed to convince the Windows business leaders to change this policy; imagine how many PCs there'd be out there if in 2003 I had gotten this policy changed and had been successful in making RDP popular amongst non-power users... As an aside, I bet sizable # of those RDP end points Dan found are actually running Windows Home Server. WHS (which is really a version of Windows Server 2003) enabled the RDP host by default because that's what the Windows Home Server console uses. It also used UPnP to enable port forwarding for remote access to the server. Users' have to opt into this feature, but many do... The good news (for WHS users) is by default WHS automatically takes Windows updates; users have to explicitly opt-out and we intentionally tried to push them away from opting-out of updates. So almost all WHS boxes probably got the patch on Tuesday. I know mine did.