It would have been better if you explained about the cables that they should use and what to connect to what(serial to serial, parallel to parallel, Infrared to Infrared) as well.
If the XP's administrator has installed webclient on top of the IIS, users do not need to have the Remote Desktop Client software.
They can just use their browser(IE) to access the machine.
<a href="http://<xpserver>/tsweb">http://<xpserver>/tsweb and it will show you a screen and ask you to key in the <xpserver> then your id and password.
You will find it more exciting than the Remote Desktop Client software.