Yeah, FireDaemon costs money now. However, Microsoft provides instsrv and srvany in the resource kit and they do the same thing, albeit with a worse user interface. But even when I get it running as a service, which is honestly not that difficult with those tools, it requires that a user be logged in for it to function correctly and the "interact with desktop" checkbox be checked. As long as a user is logged in, it works fine. As soon as they log out, it stops working. If someone logs back in again, it works fine again.

They've done something to explicitly prevent it from working when no one is logged in. While connecting to it via VNC, I did actually notice that when it gets started with no UI, it actually pops up that window for an instant before making it go away, so that's probably the problem.

But now the problem is that it consumes large amounts of CPU even while it's doing nothing. I'd consider running it as a VMWare image, but if it's going to consume that much CPU regardless, I can't even do that. Maybe VMWare has a CPU throttle?