Hi please excuse my ignorance.

If i want to be able to play poker with a german ip for example.

what would i have to rent? would a vps or vpn allow me to conect to them and run the software on the foreign machine?

or do i have to find someone who will rent me a remote access desktop?

Thanks in advanced

You idealy want a dediacted windows box located in germany if you want to run the software there. you can always just run the software localy and use a proxy or vpn.
you could also find someone on here that would rent you a box with rdc

so essentially .. yes all your suggestions would work :P + proxy

I'm intrigued, it never actually occurred to me to do this. How would you handle identification to the poker site? Or are the ones abroad more relaxed?

none of poker networks are '' relaxed '' with verification of customers ... but ... let's say will not ask you the ADN fingerprints and so on ... . Otherwise ... playing poker remotely it's quite easy just need some vps / dedi with windows installed , with some ram and video memory ... then ... start -> run -> mstsc .... you will figure yourself what you have to do from here ...