hello, i use several different accounts on my win7 machines, each for different purposes. and i want to rdp into these machines using different accounts, but when i attempt to create the RDP connection files (one for each host & account), the credentials of only the LAST saved account are used - individual credentials don't seem to be maintained. any help would be appreciated, thank you

Hi, Have you tried to save your individual connections as different Remote Desktop protocol (.rdp) files? An .rdp file contains all of the information for a connection to a terminal server, including the Options settings that were configured when the file was saved. You can customize any number of .rdp files, including files for connecting to the same server with different settings. Also, you could refer to the following article: Saving your logon credentials in Remote Desktop Connection Alex Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hello Alex, Thank you for your reply. To answer your question, yes, i do use one .rdp file for each acount for each host, so for a single computer where i use three accounts; i have three .rdp files just for that host one .rdp file for each account, and i repeat this for every host. And in reading your link it says; "... Credentials are saved _per remote computer_. For example, if you connect to five different remote computers every day and you want to use saved credentials for each of them, you need to save credentials separately for each remote computer. ..." So the example they provide is five different computers and they dont refer to multiple accounts for one host. Connecting to different hosts is not a problem, credentials are maintained in different .rdp files as long as the host is different. The article also suggests (as i've marked with the underscores) that for Win7, you can only have one set of credentials for any given single host, this is the same as what i have found which is that when i create a 2nd (or more) .rdp file the account credentials that i enter for this .rdp file overwrite any account credentials for any previously created .rdp file for that same host - and indeed as you actually ceate the .rdp file, as soon as you type the host name, it auto-fills the account field with the account information from the last created .rdp file with saved creds for that host. I hope that, if you have time, you will create two or more .rdp files for the same host and attempt to maintain unique saved account credentials for each .rdp file, and you must try to connect to them round-robin repeatedly to ensure the credentials are kept. Win7 machines all round. I can replicate this one several different machines both at home and at work with all different combinations Thanks

Arem goo is right. RDP client does not allow you to store different credentials for the same host name (one may try to teick it using different names, eg. IP for one, computer name for second one and fully qualified name for third but I'm not sure if it'll work). That's because current versions of RDP client (or rather RDP settings wizard) do not store full user credentials in the .rdp file. You can check for yourself by opening such file in notepad (or any other tool for plain flat text files). The credentials are stored somewhere in user profile encrypted stores. As far as I know, it's possible to create a .rdp file that will have user name and password stored in it and it should work, but you'll have to create such file using third party tools (as the password has to be encrypted in a specific way for the file). You can try one that is available here: http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=25204 Passwords are no longer stored in .rdp files by RDP configuration wizard as it was very easy to extract and decrypt them. What I can recommend for RDP access management those free apps: Remote Desktop Connection Manager - .Net application that allows you to configure and store multiple RDP connections in it's configuration files with passwords either encrypted or plainly visible mRemote - currently discontinued application that has lot's of configuration options and allows not only RDP use, but also SSH (uses local PuTTY application installation) and Citrix remote connections (uses local Citrix client installation) and stores user passwords in encrypted form.

So the bottom line is that the credentials used for RDP, accessing file servers, network printers etc are handled by Windows and are stored in "Credential Manager" and by design you cannot have multiple accounts saved per resource/server.Blogging about Windows for IT pros at www.theexperienceblog.com