Terminal Server Licenses; LPR Printer Problems

Terminal Server Licenses
If you use handheld PCs (H/PCs) as thin clients, be sure to install Service Pack 5 (SP5) for Windows NT Server 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (TSE) to avoid overusing connection licenses. According to Microsoft Support Online article Q241580, TSE uses any OEM-supplied Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) that appear when you change the H/PC's network adapter card or IP address. If you implement UUIDs incorrectly, the system might assign two per-seat licenses to the H/PC when you change the device's network adapter card. According to the article, SP5 resolves the problem. I haven't encountered the problem because I have only one network adapter card for my H/PC.

Whether or not you use H/PCs as thin clients on your network, you should check out Microsoft Support Online article Q187629 to familiarize yourself with the TSE licensing structure. Although the basic concepts remain the same, the licensing structure changes a bit with Windows 2000 Terminal Services.

Printing to LPR Printers Is Slow or Fails
If you haven't yet installed TSE SP4 or SP5, print jobs you send to a Line Print Daemon (LPD) printer connected to a terminal server can hang in the print queue, and Event ID 2004 might appear in the Application Event Log (AEL). According to Microsoft Support Online article Q249017, the problem is that TSE SP3 (which accompanies the base product) and SP4 default Line Print Remote (LPR) printers to TCP ports 512 through 1023 instead of the Request for Comments (RFC) 1179-compliant range of ports 721 through 731. Because the ranges overlap, printing might work, but a randomly selected TCP port is likely to fall outside the narrow range that complies with RFC 1179. Applying TSE SP5 applies the fix. The article also refers to Microsoft Support Online article Q141708, which explains why NT doesn't comply with the RFC as well as which service packs make the single- and multiuser versions of the OS compliant.

Errata
In past few weeks, the Terminal Server Knowledge Base has accumulated several entries about "by design" aspects of TSE. Ignore Microsoft Support Online article Q187467, which describes a difference in how Win16 RDP clients and Win32 RDP clients draw glyphs. Microsoft based the article on an early beta of TSE, and the information is no longer correct. In the current version, all clients use the same technology to draw glyphs. I'm told that Microsoft will be updating the Knowledge Base to make the correction.