UltraVNC

Indeed you are correct. I'd done experiments on both DES as well as TripleDES, and had the tripleDES code handy.

I ended up hacking vncpasswd to take a password on STDIN and spit out the encrypted password suitable for inclusion in a .vnc file or a registry hive.

I've contacted the authors of various VNC related utilities and everyone is using the encryption algorithm pulled directly from the VNC source. This casts serious doubts on my ability to implement this the way I wanted, so at this point I'm going to run with plan B. I've got a perl module called VNC ...

I've had success in similar situations by turning down hardware accelleration for the video card. In my case I had to crank it down to the lowest setting. In XP the accelleration slider is in the "advanced" section of your display adapter properties, in the tab called "Troubleshooting"

You CAN do
c:\progra~1\Ultravnc\winvnc.exe -install

and it will set up as close to a service as you can get on windows 9x. It basically just throws an entry in HKLM/windows/current version/run.

Not really a service, but it' accomplishes the same thing.

This one crosses multiple disciplines (PERL, VNC, Registry editing) so maybe I'll get lucky and someone has done this before. The folks in the PERL groups are crusty old buzzards and I KNOW they'd shout me down for posting there. I'd like to write a PERL script that will take a plaintext password ...