I have searched all over the UO Website, and Googled it but cannot seem to find what the rules are towards running multiple clients on the same computer? If it is deemed illegal what about running it off another computer at the same time?

If anyone can answer my question it would be most appreciated!

It's legal as long as no third party program is used
The only way I know of doing it, is using Windows XP's fast user switching facility
But that means you have to keep switching back and forth between user accounts

I know there are those programs like *snip* and *snip* that do it, but im not a fan of using something which can get me banned even though a hell of aload of people do use it. Surely there must be some sort of registry setting one can do to make 2 clients run. Hopefully maybe someone else has found a way of doing it without using a third party program. Cheers Adam!

I have tried doing this with no success on the same machine with one operating system. I would get a message that says "An instance of UO is already running." One way around this is using a virtual machine...MS Virtual PC, VMware, etc. This works, but you have to install another operating system on that "virtual machine", which takes a lot of space if you just want to run a second client for UO. I had one already setup for development purposes, so it was no big deal to me, but if that wasn't the case, I would have a hard time justifying it if I didn't have much HD space available.

I have a 500gb hard drive which is only about half full, I have heard of this VM before and its free supposdly? does it work on Vista x64?

I have beta version of VMware which was free, but I don't think the released version is...I could be wrong. MS Virtual PC is free I believe, which can be downloaded from the microsoft web site. I believe the new version 7.0 or 7.1 is Vista friendly.

An article and link to the free version of MS Virtual PC here

Supposed, with "Fast User Switching" active, its very quick to swap between XP user accounts. Id try it first as it seems to be the easiest option and one I know to have been deemed legal by EA.

If your system is low on RAM, it's not very quick. Even with plenty of RAM, it's useful to do things like transfer items from one of your characters to another on another account, or to set up vendors between your own 2 accounts, but you can't do anything that requires you to control both characters simultaneously.

In my experience, the fastest you can switch from one account to the other is 25 seconds or so, and that's on a beastly machine. It's much slower on my laptop, which isn't as powerful as my desktop.

i use this ALL the time, and its VERY quick and easy. windows key + L. takes no more then 5 sec to go back and forth(and my ram is pretty low)