Getting XP Mode like display behavior with VirtualBox or VMWare on Win7, Vista or XP

Liam Westley - How to enable RemoteApp (via RDP 7.0) within a VirtualBox or VMWare virtual machine running Windows 7, Vista SP1+ or Windows XP SP3

“What is RemoteApp?

This is used within the XP Mode within Windows 7 to provide seamless application integration where applications running under Windows XP appear as application windows floating over the Windows 7 desktop. 

RemoteApp is only the remote display technology which enables this to occur.  It should be noted that XP Mode also includes logic to integrate start menu items and saving of documents and files which are not covered by RemoteApp alone.

Why would you want RemoteApp?

For all those people using XP Mode to run a nicely sandboxed IE6 for testing purposes, you can now achieve exactly the same result without having to install Virtual PC.  This is important if you are already running virtual machines in another platform, such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation (or Player) as running Virtual PC XP Mode has a habit of causing your other virtual machines to crash with very little warning.

Also, unlike XP Mode, seamless mode in VirtualBox or ‘unity’ mode in VMWare Workstation, you can use this on a non local virtual machine.  So you could happily have a network server with IE6 instances pooled for all developers.  With VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation this also means we can use an application on 64-bit or multi CPU installations which XP Mode does not support.

Step 1 - Configuring the guest virtual machine to allow RemoteApp access

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Good for those who are into VWWare/VirtualBox and/or Vista/XP.