Single Session per User - Remote Desktop

The app I mention is actually a middleware that handles messaging between to separate systems.  That's why I mentioned that they should run as services no apps in an session.

Yep I know, and in fact I set it that way but.  If you log on the server normaly (as opposed to the console) it still lets you log to the console with the same account, with out replacing the another session, which is the behavior you get (and the one I want) when you don't log to the console session.

I'd love to! but those are installations that have being working for quite some time now and being critical to the operation (handles lots of $$$) I prefer not to touch them.

But you can bet, new installations are going that way.

You just nailed it!

And yes to use VM have come across my mind a couple of times, however I need to be careful to minimize any posible impact.

Well I'm not sure that screen-scrape is need here all the users need to check is that the app(s) are live and kicking and they can do that just by looking at the UI if it is dead, kill it (Task Man) a restart it no further acction is required.  The rest of the information is (verbosely) logged to files.

I tried alternative solutions here, I even managed to scrap half of those apps.  The part that actually handles the transport and persistance part for 3rd party systems I rewrote it entirely in C#, it can now safely run as a service, I made it more resilient a various levels, it has been in production for quite some time now as smooth as silk.  In fact I earned a gigantic bonus because of that 

However the rest of that suite (POC is a better term), handles the business logic, not to mention that it is supported/maintained by our headquarters in Europe.  And this time I had to agree with my boss and rule out a replacement because it's too risky.  Unexpected behavior for the rest of the solution, and non-company-standard implementation, is on top of my list.

Anyway, I even tried the scrapping-the-damned-POS approach, and took it as far as I could go.  But that still left us struggling with the "really 1 instance has to run 7x24 no matter who is on the box" problem I don't know if that can be accomplished by the RDP client app you mentioned.

the thing is a single app instance no matter who and about the script... yep I just did it!

here I post the code in Powershell 1.0, hope is useful for other people.

#############################

[string]$user="HDTS"
[int]$session=0

$p=[System.Diagnostics.Process]::GetCurrentProcess()
[string]$cur_user=[System.Environment]::UserName
[int]$cur_session=$p.SessionId
if($cur_user -eq $user)
{
 if($cur_session -eq $session)
 {
  write-host "Starting Applications"
  & 'C:\prog1.exe'
  & 'C:\prog2.exe'
 }
 else
 {
  [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")
  [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::Show(@("The account $user can only be used with MSTSC /CONSOLE or MSTSC /ADMIN"), [System.Environment]::MachineName, [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBoxButtons]::OK, [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBoxIcon]::Error);
 }
}
else
{ 
 if($cur_session -eq $session)
 {
  [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms")
  [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox]::Show("You just replaced the replace the account of the user $user. Log off inmediately and log on as $user usando MSTSC /CONSOLE o /ADMIN", [System.Environment]::MachineName, [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBoxButtons]::OK, [System.Windows.Forms.MessageBoxIcon]::Error);
 }
}