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How to: enable remote desktop on Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (x64 & x86) Edition

Update 6.8.09:
In light of Vista SP2, some files have changed. Please see this post.

For the impatient:
Don't wanna read a lot of babble? Download the file, read the readme.txt file, and you're done.

I just got a new Dell Dimension XPS M1330, but I was really bummed to find that the Version of Vista it had—Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (x64)—didn't allow incoming remote desktop connections. Lame! Fortunately, there's an easy fix. Read on....

What to do:
Download this zip file and extract it wherever you want; then choose either the x64 or the x86 folder depending on if your version of Vista is 32-bit or 64-bit. Then, you will notice there are three batch files; simply run the one that corresponds to your version of Vista (there are batch files for Business and Ultimate as well). When you run the batch file, be sure to right-click and choose "Run as Administrator" or it won't work.

Note: If you do not have Vista SP1 installed on your machine, I'm not sure if this will work or not. I doubt it.

Helpful tip
If you have two or more computers on your network accepting remote desktop connections, and you have a hardware firewall that is forwarding ports, you'll need to change the listening port(s) on the additional machine(s) and then forward them appropriately.

Legal Disclaimer added 1.11.09
If you use this tool, you should have a paid license for a version of Windows Vista that contains remote desktop officially; and you're not currently using it. Otherwise this hack might be illegal (i.e., you're getting features you didn't pay for). I'm not really sure—just throwing this out there in case (for example, I have a paid version of Vista Ultimate x64 that I don't have installed on anything right now).

Update added 2.09.08
John Wolf left a comment addressing something a lot of people have been asking about—the issue of taking over an existing session vs. creating a new session each time. He said:

I’ve been fishing to solve the issue of it creating a new session when you RDP to a Vista box. After digging through the thread on the green button, I found a registry setting that remedies this issue. There’s a key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\fSingleSessionPerUser, that defaults to 0 which means create multiple sessions per user. Simply setting this to 1 will give you what you want. I just verified this and it works like a charm!

His comment is #36 below. Thanks John for finding this fix—I think it answers a lot of questions!