Vista RDP client on Window XP - the quick and dirty way

This Works-For-Me(tm) as of Build 5308 of Windows Vista/Longhorn aka Feb 2006 CTP.

Copy mstsc.exe and mstscax.dll from your Vista install's System32 directory (aka %SystemRoot%\System32) to your XP machine.

In the directory that you copied those files to, create a directory that matches your MUI language, for instance, for English (US), this would be a directory called "en-US".

Copy mstsc.exe.mui and mstscax.dll.mui from your Vista install's System32\en-US [replace en-US with your MUI] to your newly created MUI directory.

Why did I do this? It is an oddball situation I will admit. I have a VMWare install of Vista on my laptop that needs to access a few Novell fileshares. As far as I know, there isn't a Novell client made for Vista yet.

Next question is, how does this allow Vista access those drives? Well, I have the Novell client installed on my host OS (Windows XP), and I use the RDP client to connect to the virtual machine's "LAN" device. This allows me to avoid using VMWare's console for the most part, and I can get away with not installing most of the VMWare utilities on the Vista client, and of course, as long as I allow the RDP session access to my laptop drive shares, I can get to the Novell servers I need to get to. True, you can do this with the normal XP RDP client, but I wanted to use the RDP 6.0 protocol. Some might call it "thinking outside of the box", I call it "thinking outside of the VM box."

How did I figure this out? I have a bad habit of fooling with things until they either completely break or work. It seems that my youngest daughter has the same habit already at age 1. She has the TV remote control mastered and now she's figuring out X-Box games, which is a little bit mindblowing to me.