Many a times we come across a situation when our Windows terminal server which was accepting RDP connections from the domain users stops doing so for some reason that we really would not know. In such cases we normally tend to try and restart a service to fix this and finally land up rebooting the Windows box.
The question to be asked is.. Is there any such service which when restarted will start accepting RDP connection requests to that server. The answer would be NO and it is so because of the following reasons:

* A Terminal Services service which is responsible for letting successful RDP connections to be established to a server and it can NEVER be Stopped/Started/Restarted manually by any Administrator.
* We cannot manually Stop/Start/Restart this service like most other services because it is an integrated part of the core OS in Windows and hence the option to do so it is grayed out.

With that I can conclude that any Windows terminal server which when suddenly stops accepting any RDP requests made to it should be rebooted to make it start accepting connections. Unless some configuration changes were made to the server for it to behave so, a reboot will always work.. Configuration changes could be like changing the port from the default 3389 to something else or some changes to the TS settings.

Terminal Services AKA TermService
Allows users to connect interactively to a remote computer. Remote Desktop, Fast User Switching, Remote Assistance, and Terminal Server depend on this service - stopping or disabling this service may make your computer unreliable.  To prevent remote use of this computer, clear the checkboxes on the Remote tab of the System properties control panel item.

Like always, feel free to challenge/oppose/comment on this article.

#wyn