I went deep into the rabbit hole on this one, and found a really well performing VNC configuration that I think works every bit as well (if not better, in many ways) than RDP. It takes a little bit of config, but hopefully what I'm sharing here will help others that are trying to make this work.
VEP slave machine: Tight VNC Server
DAW/VEP master machine: RealVNC Viewer
I had to play with the different VNC encodings, but I found HEXTILE and ZRLE2 to work really well for high bandwidth LAN scenarios. You will find the encodings selection in a drop down menu in the "Expert" tab of the RealVNC Viewer configuration.
This configuration comes at a cost of bandwidth consumption, but I'm on a Gigabit LAN and it isn't a big concern. CPU usage was about the same as RDP, slightly lower because of the GPU offload on the remote.
Note that VNC doesn't just work "out-of-the-box" like RDP. The major benefit of RDP is the ease of use because it works with your native display resolution with no fuss. VNC is a different animal. Because it is rendered on the remote machine, you need to make sure that the resolution/aspect ratio doesn't conflict in any way with your native display. I found resolution mismatches to not only make the screen difficult to navigate and look awful, but it would cause visual artifacts and screen lags also. What really worked well for me was forcing the remote machine to render the display in the same resolution as my native display. Once you do this and get your encoding set to HEXTILE or ZRLE2 you will see a huge performance increase and a virtual display that looks and acts like your native desktop.
So, there you have it. With a little bit of configuration work and experimentation you can replace RDP with something that doesn't crash VEPro or give you startup errors. Best of luck!
Regards,
Jason Todd Shannon