Just a quickie that comes up quite often – how to disconnect the console user on a remote server, in particular, a Windows 2000 server where you can’t use RDP to connect directly to the console itself; i.e. you can’t mstsc /console or /admin (depending on the version of the RDP client).

If you’ve not already got a copy of the Sysinternals Suite on you system, grab a copy from Microsoft’s site as the tool you’ll need is PsShutdown. At a command prompt, type the following:

PSSHUTDOWN \\remoteserver -O -F -T 0

You can then verify the session has been logged out with the following:

QWINSTA /server:remoteserver