When I’m booting up a virtual machine on my PC I always have to dig into the network details or run ipconfig in  order to determine the IP Address before I can use remote desktop. To save one of those steps you can run bginfo from the startup folder to get it to automatically write the IP Address and other details to the desktop background:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897557.aspx

and

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/run-program-automatically-windows-starts