“The remote computer disconnected the session because of an error in licensing protocol” in Windows Vista.
Odds are you are reading this article because you have encountered this error message while trying to connect to a remote computer using Windows Vista’s Remote Desktop client. If you’ve researched this problem you’ve probably seen the fix for it. The official knowledge base article from Microsoft tells you how to fix this problem. However, if you are running Windows Vista, this probably did not resolve the issue for you. You’re probably perplexed, confused, and a little scared. Don’t worry, it’ll be ok.
If you’ve been using Windows Vista for a bit you’ve noticed that when you try to run many programs, your screen goes dark and the Windows UAC asks you if you if you want to run the program. What is happening is Windows is automatically asking if you want to run the program as an administrator, because as a regular user can’t run some programs. Remote Desktop is no exception.
When you start Remote Desktop in Vista it does not run as an administrator and the UAC box won’t pop up asking you to (I’ve seen laptops were it did work before, but now now, possibly a Windows update or something else that has changed). So there’s 3 ways around this problem.
1) Right click the icon and click “Run as Administrator”
2) In the search menu on the Start menu type “mstsc” (no quotes) and then instead of hitting Enter press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run mstsc.exe (Remote Desktop) as an administrator.
3) The less-hassel way it to open regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSLicensing, and right-click and change the permissions so all users have full control of that key.
No reboot is required. The next time you try to connect to a computer using RDP you should have no problems. That means you can spend less time playing Vista Ultimate’s Holdem Poker and more time working!