My coworker Chad sent out a link to this article on the SitePoint blog a long time ago (probably about a year and a half ago) and I’ve been meaning to try it since that day, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Recently I started a new project for a client that is still supporting IE7 so I figured I better try to have an easy way to verify things in IE7. The article is really well written and is very easy to follow. I’m only writing about it is to say how cool it is (or sad, depending on how you look at it) to be able to get around the restriction of only being able to run one version of IE on each Windows instance and to point out the one hiccup I ran into and how to fix it.
I got through all the steps to get the XP Mode VM created and running, but when I went to adjust the Terminal Services “Limit Maximum Color Depth” policy on the guest XP OS (Windows Virtual PC uses Remote Desktop to display the VM desktop and 16 bit color is the default depth restriction) the policy wasn’t there for me to edit. If it’s not there, you have to add the system policy template back in to the Administrative Templates folder in the Group Policy editor (Start –> Run : gpedit.msc). I got this info from a forum post. Right-click the Administrative Templates folder, select Add/Remove Templates and add the system.adm template. The Terminal Services “Limit Maximum Color Depth” policy will now be there to edit as described in the article. I’m not sure if this has to be done any time a fresh XP VM is created, or if I just had some Windows Update fluke when updating the guest XP OS that somehow eliminated the policy template. Anyway, that’s how to remedy the situation to fix the color depth issue if the policy is missing.
After following the rest of the steps, I have a shortcut to launch IE7 running on XP almost as if it were a native application running directly in my main Windows 7 OS. If the VM is running, it launches just as fast as if it were a native app. If the VM has hibernated, it takes a few seconds, but is not a problem (launches about as fast as FF4 does). The only things that give it away as a non-native application is that it is in an XP-style window and since it is a remote desktop, the window does not support all the Aero theme transparency and peek preview type stuff. I’ll probably need to create another for IE8 eventually since IE9 is out…
