Quickbooks in a Terminal Server environment

Yesterday, I had the task of setting up an extremely limited access user to be able to run QuickBooks(and QuickBooks only) through a terminal server session.

I headed to the QuickBooks support site to see if there were any initial pointers before I embarked on this journey. Only to find that QuickBooks basic, pro, and premier are not supported in terminal services, but their enterprise version(starting at $3,500) is. The version I was working with was Premier, so I knew I wasn’t going to get any help from Intuit.

Starting with this KB Article, I created a special OU where these users are going to be placed and modified group policies to prevent access to just about everything. Then setup redirected desktop and start menu folders.

I logged in as a test user to verify my settings, and everything looked good, except there was a Microsoft Outlook icon on the desktop. So I found this KB Article and was able to remove it globally from the system. The article talks about renaming the registry key, I tried that first, but it didn’t work, so I just deleted it. Then wammo, no more icon. Everything was looking great.

So then for the finally, I obviously need to launch QuickBooks and verify that it works. And right away I’m hit with an error message, telling me that my limited user access is preventing QuickBooks from running.

Back the internet. I didn’t find much info searching the web so I searched the newsgroups where I found this site. After looking at the instructions on that site I knew I wasn’t going to reinstall QuickBooks, so I started following it at the registry changes. A quick test, and sure enough, everything was working perfectly.

Thank you Internet! I was able to have this completely working in about 2 hour�s time including all the different researching I did. Maybe these links will be of value to someone else down the road, which is why I made this entry.

Article links:
How to lock down a Windows 2000 Terminal Server session
How to remove the Outlook icon from your desktop
Changes nesescary to make Quickbooks work in a terminal session
Intuits official stance on their products running on a terminal server