In reference to this article about Windows on Amazon EC2: http://www.howtoforge.com/amazon_elastic_compute_cloud_qemu_p2 I get to step 6 then I have a problem. The Linux host isn't able to make Remote Desktop connections to the virtual machine running XP SP 2. I used Wireshark and saw that some, maybe 5, packets were being transmitted between the client and RDC server, but then it just times out. I disabled the Windows Firewall, and flushed iptables. Any thoughts? The Windows Event Manager also doesn't contain any related entries. This hasn't much to do with EC2, I am doing this locally so there isn't an EC2 issue that could be causing problems. And yes I know Amazon supports Windows, but I need a desktop variant, not Windows Server. Thank you.