I've been using VNC, including countless variants like UltraVNC and RealVNC, to access my home PC forever (OK, probably since around 1997 or so, so for the purposes of computer lifespans, that easily constitutes forever ). I even moderate a (not-so-active) open source project called DelphiVNC. However, I tried Remote Desktop recently, and I immediately switched to it. My reasons for doing this were:

• Speed - RD seems much faster than VNC
• Easy file copy between systems
• Can stream remote sound to the local PC
• Easy to setup and configure
• Web access

Here are some of the links that I used to get things up and running:

• Good general overview of features from MS
• Getting access to local files in an RD session
• RD Web Connection setup will let you connect to the remote PC from the local PC via IE.
• How to use RD over SSH. This is a good FAQ for other RD items, too. It appears that as of XP SP2, you don't have to run in compatibility mode, at least as long as you try to connect to another port (e.g. 127.0.0.1:3390). Step 9 in this documnet means that you need to set up a SSH tunnel to forward from port 3390 to 3389. Pay close attention to the fact that you need to logout, though. If you don't do that when ending a session, you will need to reboot the remote PC to get RD working again.

If you go to a command prompt and type, "mstsc /?", you will see the different options you can pass in. I set up a few different RD profiles by selecting the Options button, filling out the details I wanted, and saving the profile. I then made shortcuts to pass in the rdp file to let me get quick and easy access to the remote PC.

Let me know how this works for you.