Hey All. I'm a technical consultant and one of our recently acquired clients has a problem with their server that has been causing some headache. It's a Server 2008 Standard Box and acts as DC/File Server. The problem is that the server wont listen for RDP connections which is critical for our setup.

I have verified firewall rules are set correctly, disabled anti-virus, reinstalled remote desktop services, uninstalled updates, ran SFC scan, re-registered term services DLL. When services applet is opened I noticed Remote Desktop Services is "stopped". I've tried starting it manually but it comes up with message stating "Remote desktop services started and than stopped".

Its unknown whether RDP was working before we acquired server as the previous technical provider has disappeared. I'm completely lost and would appreciate any support I can get. Thanks.

In eventvwr, select View > Show Analytic and Debug logs (it will check that option). Then go down into the App and Services > Microsoft > Windows logs, and you will have 3 different Terminal Services folders with logs in them, as well as a Service Reporting API log folder. Enable all of the log options inside those folders that aren't already enabled (some will be, but others won't be by default) and then reproduce the issue. You should get some good logging there, hopefully.