title: Is it possible to launch a remote app and have it displayed interactively in Windows?
body: <p>I am sure this has been asked before, but I have yet to find the question or answer.</p>
  
  <p>I have a custom tabbed application that displays data from various scientific instruments on each tab. My users want to click a tab and have my application start various instrument controller applications (or have it brought to the foreground) on another machine when a tab is clicked in my application. </p>
  
  <p>I've experimented with lots of different approaches, from writing my own C# app to do Process.Start, writing a 2nd C# app that lives on the remote machine and kicks off the appropriate app, using Sysinternals' psexec, etc. I can get the process to start successfully on the remote machine, but the GUI is missing no matter which user's credentials I supply (and regardless of whether a user is logged on interactively.) I believe this is a security enhancement in Windows.</p>
  
  <p>Looking at the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa389388%28v=vs.85%29.aspx" rel="nofollow">Create() method of the Win32_Process MSDN documentation</a> reveals what I suspected - For security reasons the Win32_Process.Create method cannot be used to start an interactive process remotely.</p>
  
  <p>It looks like the best I can do is <a href="https://mail.tietronix.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=c7e3c62d373747b78f5f0858aff2445c&amp;URL=http%3a%2f%2fmotevich.blogspot.com%2f2007%2f11%2fexecute-program-on-remote-computer.html" rel="nofollow">remotely access Task Scheduler to kick off the remote application</a> after some time interval. I'm sure this would bring a horrible user experience to my app (who wants to click a tab and wait 30 seconds?) so I am avoiding that approach.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone suggest an approach that will work, or help disprove the possibility of doing this?</p>
  
  <p><b>EDIT</b> psexec's own <a href="http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553" rel="nofollow">documentation</a> bears out my contention that it's not possible. The -x flag says "Display the UI on the Winlogon desktop (local system only)." If it were possible I'm sure that Sysinternals would have made it happen.</p>