Skype can't access sound card in Windows XP connected via RDP

Question

I'm on Windows XP Professional. From this machine, I'm connecting via RDP to another Windows XP Professional machine. Now when I go to Skype to place a voice call on the remote machine, it says that it can't access the sound card.

What could be the issue?

Answer 1

Skype running over RDP is not supported.

This is for 2 reasons:

1. The latency involved, and the bandwidth constraints, would make it a very poor experience, and Skype don't like giving their customers poor experiences.
2. More importantly - RDP doesn't support incoming sound - only outgoing sound - so you don't actually have a microphone available in RDP.

There may be some third-party application which would give you a virtual microphone over the network, but it's not something that I would relish doing unless I was on a very fast connection to the target machine.