Windows 8 “XP Mode” – Part 2: Windows XP

• Author
• Recent Posts

Kyle Beckman

Kyle Beckman works as a systems administrator in Atlanta, GA supporting Office 365 in higher education. He has 17+ years of systems administration experience.

Latest posts by Kyle Beckman (see all)

• Managing shared mailboxes in Office 365 with PowerShell - Thu, May 5 2016
• Managing shared mailboxes in Office 365 with the GUI - Wed, May 4 2016
• Installing and configuring the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) - Wed, Mar 16 2016

Now that you have a virtual machine running Windows XP Professional with the Hyper-V Integration Components, you’ll want to do all the things you normally would do to a computer: install all the latest Windows Updates, install antivirus, activate Windows (if necessary), and install your applications that you’ll want to run inside of Windows XP.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to enable Remote Desktop in Windows XP. To do that, go to the computer properties (Right-click on My Computer > Properties or the System applet in the Control Panel) and then go to the Remote tab. Check the ‘Allow users to connect remotely to this computer’ checkbox, click ‘Select Remote Users’ if you need to add user accounts, and then click OK.

Windows 8 XP Mode - Allow user to connect remotely to this computer

Next, you’ll need to install Update 961742. This update will enable the RemoteApp functionality in Windows XP that is available on Windows Server as part of Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services). After installing the update, reboot your VM.

Windows 8 XP Mode - RemoteApp for Windows XP SP3

After rebooting, you’ll need to tweak one setting in the Registry. Fire up the Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\TsAppAllowList. Change the DWORD value fDisabledAllowList to 1.

Windows 8 XP Mode -  fDisabledAllowList

Next, open the Remote Desktop Connection client on your Windows 8 computer. In the Computer field, enter the network name of your VM. Connect to the VM to ensure that your Remote Desktop configuration is working. When you’re done testing the Remote Desktop connection, make sure you log completely out of your XP session.

Now that your RDP connection to the VM is working, open Notepad and create a text file with the following:

full address:s:winxp

remoteapplicationmode:i:1

disableremoteappcapscheck:i:1

alternate shell:s:rdpinit.exe

prompt for credentials on client:i:1

remoteapplicationname:s:Internet Explorer 6

remoteapplicationprogram:s:C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe

remoteapplicationcmdline:s:about:blank

redirectclipboard:i:1

redirectposdevices:i:0

redirectprinters:i:1

redirectcomports:i:1

redirectsmartcards:i:1

devicestoredirect:s:*

drivestoredirect:s:*

redirectdrives:i:1

session bpp:i:32

span monitors:i:1

use multimon:i:1

allow font smoothing:i:1

You will probably want to customize the following settings in the file:

• full address – The network name of your VM.
• remoteapplicationname – The name of the application on the VM
• remoteapplicationprogram – The path to the application on the VM
• remoteapplicationcmdline – Command line options for the executable; this is optional

Save the file as a .rdp file. As you can see in my example, the name of my XP VM is winxp and I’m running Internet Explorer 6 and forcing the executable to open about:blank when it runs.

Windows 8 XP Mode - .rdp file

Because your .rdp file is not digitally signed, you may receive an unknown publisher warning. In the event you do, click the Connect button.

Windows 8 XP Mode - The publisher of this RemoteApp can't be identified

Next, you’ll get the RemoteApp connection window. Enter your username and password and your application will run. In the screenshot, you can see IE10 and IE6 running side-by-side.

Windows 8 XP Mode - RemoteApp connection

In my next post I will discuss some Windows 8 XP Mode gotchas.