Making XP Mode work on a domain

Scenario

You have shiny new Win7 PCs for your users, but several applications are not compatible with Win7. You’ve tried every trick in the book (including swearing) to make the applications work, but still no joy.

The answer is to use XP Mode, which is free if you have Win7 Professional or above.

XP Mode is great, but can also be a pain to get working happily on your domain. Here’s what I did:

Solution

  1. Go to Tools > Settings and change the Networking Adapter dropdown from Shared Networking (NAT) to the name of the hardware adapter (in my case it was Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller). This will enable the XP Mode virtual machine (VM) to get its own IP address from the domain network:
  2. Add the domain user account to the Remote Desktop Users local group:
  3. Run gpedit.msc from the command prompt, then confirm Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment\Allow log on through Terminal Services has the Remote Desktop Users group added:
  4. Once you join the XP Mode VM to the domain, everything should now work fine.