Okay, I've been pulling my hair out for the last three days as Remote Desktop is running very slow and timing out on my Vista machine, calls to the host provided and BT have not solved the issue.

Found out this morning that remote desktop works fine on my XP machine, so it must be something Vista is doing.  After a quick search on the net I found this article, and it worked, now running Remote Desktop at the right speed.

http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/microsoft/remote-desktop-slow-problem-solved.asp 

In short

 

Here is what you need to do if you have the same issue:

 

– Run a command prompt (cmd.exe) as an Administrator

– Type: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

 

If you want to to re-enable it:

– Type: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=normal

 

In some cases you may need to use this command in addition to the above, but I didn't have to:

– Type: netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled