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I am able to display windows from an UNIX machine on a Windows client using SSH X11 forwarding. But is it possible to do the opposite? Let's say I have a Windows virtual machine and run some software on it (which does not play too well with Wine) - then I would like to keep the VM in a headless mode and forward the application UI to X11 on a Linux host.

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There are a few approaches that should work here. This post (which ought to be on SU) mentions the problem and there are some usable answers. Most of the answers are pretty old, though.

The official solution from Microsoft is to use a feature called RemoteApp, which lets you forward individual windows over RDP instead of sending the whole desktop. It's only officially supported (for the host side) on Server versions of Windows, though, and your Windows VM is probably not a Server edition.

This blog post talks about getting RemoteApps working on client ("normal") Windows editions. You still need the Terminal Services (RDP) server, so you need the Professional/Business/Enterprise/Education/Ultimate versions of Windows; Home or similar won't work. The blog posts recommends using the third-party program RemoteApp Tool, but this tool's site says it won't work on Professional/Business editions; you need Enterprise, Ultimate, or Education. I don't know if the manual registry editing described in the blog post would work on Professional/Business editions.

To get RemoteApps working on Linux, you may or may not need to use a program other than rdesktop. This question's answers on SF talks about FreeRDP, which is apparently a fork of rdesktop that does support RemoteApps.

There's also the option of telling Windows to use a custom shell (also mentioned in the SO answers), which can't be used to connect to an existing session but does let you display just a single application. One advanced use of this is SeamlessRDP, which runs a custom shell that forwards windows to the rdesktop client individually. It claims to not support Win7 or Win8, though, which may mean it doesn't work on non-Server editions of Windows

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I am assuming you are looking to launching just specific applications and not all

Unfortunately this feature doesn't exist where you can just launch specific windows applications from within windows guest VM on you UNIX host

It's just all or nothing using RDP client

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