I have a windows 7 Pro OA machine and imported a windows xp home edition via the disk2vhd tool and the repair feature of the xp home machine installation cd. I have installed sp3 on the virtual machine and then tried to install the integration features. This somehow works, but i can't share drives between host and guest. I also get a message stating

Could not enable integration features

Ensure that the renote access and Group Policy settings in the virtual machine operating system allow remote connections. Please contact your administrator for more details.

Now i guess this warning is shown, because in fact windows xp home has no remote desktop support and there are no group policies to configure. I tried and succeeded in getting gpedit.msc to work in xp home, but how do i enable remote desktop without hacking the vpc machine into a xp pro?

You don't - you'll have to hack it. If you've got a Windows 7 Pro machine, is there any reason you aren't just using the XP Mode VM download of XP Pro you're already licensed to use?

Yes, there's a very good reason for that: There are tons of XP Programs that have to be preserved (Microsoft Word 2.0c for example) and I have huge doubts these programs will run under 7. I don't have the Installation media for the programs anymore plus there are some programs containing lots of user specific data like an e-mail client and version specific macros for word.

In the meantime i succeeded in getting an XP Pro out of a home Edition. I hacked it, then installed the Remote App update and since then whenever the HomeTurnedPro XP booted i got an error stating at the logon screen that stated windows couldn't be started because of some activation error, code 0x800... But even before that error I had some minor problems with this hacked version:

Under Properties of "My Computer" the whole "Remote" Tab had vanished (under home at least the upper part of that tab is present). And i had to manually install gpedit with another hack.

To remove the error I took an xp Pro CD and repaired the home installation. This way i have a legit Pro version. I thought this would solve all my problems until I saw in the device manager that the Virtual PC Guest Bus driver was not installed. I looked at that driver in the XPmode machine and found out it depends on ACPI.

When I started my wonderful Virtualization Journey some stupid f*ck told me "at my place we turned off acpi and all our virtualization problems were resolved".

So now, after I had everything installed, i'm repairing the installation again, this time for an acpi-pc.

If you run into a similar problem, I found out by googling that you can do a repair install for an xp system for which you have turned on acpi after installation by pressing f5 in the windows xp setup menu. It's the same window in which you're prompted to press f6 for the installation of third party scsi drivers.

The Process looks good until now; I am currently re-installing sp3, so that i can re-install the integration features. In the device manager the computer is now identified as an ACPI PC and an unknown device is listed which hopefully is the Guest Bus and will get installed with the integration features. Wish me luck.

ACPI is THE key!

If you don't have it enabled, the guest bus driver won't work and you can't install integration features.