I have been playing with Dameware's Mini Remote Control program for over a month. Having been a huge fan of various flavors of VNC I was a little skeptical that I would find Dameware useful enough to purchase.
Well, I purchased it. I actually purchased it after about 1 hour of testing. The User Interface is sleek and very intuitive. I can run Dameware from a Command Line which is important to me as I want to be able to initiate a Dameware session from another application. The available Command line arguments are not as good as VNC BUT Dameware works natively with Vista as well as Smart Card Logons. Here is a standard command line that I use to initiate a Dameware session on a Vista machine called Homer:
dwrcc.exe -h: -m:homer -a:3 -x:
While I can choose different authentication methods the "-a:3" option select Smart Card Logon.
If your target machine does not have the Dameware agent already installed then you are prompted by Dameware to install the agent. The installation is quick and, so far, painless. You can also configure your Dameware console to automatically install the agent (and/or start the service) without a prompting you. This is done via the View menu, "Local Global Options..."
Target behavior can be customized by editing the DWRCS.INI file which resides in the %WINDIR%\System32 directory. For the most part, all Dameware settings can be modified in this file.
One feature that I would love to see would be the ability to automatically perform some custom actions after the session closes. This became apparent to me when attempting to use a Smart Card via the Smart Card Logon feature in Dameware. When using this feature your certificates will be made available to applications (Internet Explorer, Outlook, etc). This can be confusing for users who see the certificates of different administrators. I simply wanted to be able to run a custom built script that removes the certificates.