Opportunistic locking and remote desktop

Published on December 18, 2007

Here's a little word of warning to others who may spend some of their time in the IT trenches.  If someone asks you to change the Windows Opportunistic Locking settings, as per this knowledge base article.  Be warned, it may break your ability to remote desktop to the server.  It did for me. 

Of course, changing the setting back when you cannot remote desktop back in is a little trickier.  Thankfully, remote registry and Shutdown.exe came to the rescue.

And if you are wondering why the hell I was playing with the opportunistic locking settings, well it appears that some business applications still use ISAM database architectures which are extremely prone to data corruption.  Don't get me started...