How can I elegantly manage a machine for running slideshows using VNC or RDP?

Question

I have a WinXP professional machine that is connected to a video distribution system. It needs to display a slideshow on screen, and this slideshow will be changed every weekend or so. The person managing the slideshow is savvy enough to use VNC-like solutions, but is not a technical specialist.

I see two options with two downsides:

Option 1:

Make use of WinXP Pro's built-in Microsoft Remote Desktop server. This is marginally more secure than VNC, and has the major plus of being able to do folder redirection. This will make it much easier for the user to upload new slides each week. The downside is that RDP locks the server's screen when the user signs on to a remote session, and it stays locked after the user signs off. This basically defeats the purpose, except there is a rather kludge-y workaround.

Option 2:

Install a 3rd party VNC server and use that to simulate local access. This solves the screen locking problem, but makes it more difficult to upload the new set of files. The user is Mac-based, and would ideally be using the built-in "Screen Sharing" VNC client (or the Microsoft Remote Desktop app in the first option). I'm not really concerned with VNC's more lax security.

Does anyone have any elegant ways to solve either of those two downsides, or a different option entirely that I'm missing?

Answer 1

Further research seems to prove that to use RDP here would be foolhardy--the session needs to persist, and VNC allows for this easily. Making sure "sessions are always shared" seems to ensure this.

For file transfers, I hadn't considered simply using Dropbox (or similar alternative). That should wrap this all up in an easy-to-use and elegant package.