Hi Janine,
Based on
some discussion over on Sun's forums, it looks like this is often due to running on a 64-bit system (I'd check both the OS, and the Java version installed and ensure they're both 32-bit). Note that Studio comes with its own JVM, so he would have had to have replaced or overridden that (unlikely). It's more likely that the OS is 64-bit.
Aside from that possibility, please ask your student to ensure that he's installed the software on a
supported system configuration.
It likely that the use of RDC is unrelated to this issue, unless he can confirm that it always works 100% of the time when used locally, and only fails when RDC is used.
Regards,
Vance