2Fix: Crashes and lock-ups with remote desktop

For the last 9 months or so I’ve had a suc­ces­sion of issues with remote desktop between my Win­dows 7 desktop PC and vari­ous HTPC’s which are also run­ning Win­dows 7. After quite a long jour­ney I seemed to have finally irons out all the problems.

The first issue appeared, as if by magic, when I found some newly installed PCs were freez­ing when accessed via remote desktop. I could log in fine, but if I min­im­ised the remote desktop win­dow when I returned I could­n’t get any com­mu­nic­a­tion. The remote PC had­n’t crashed — I could close remote desktop and then log back in, but every min­im­ise caused a loss of com­mu­nic­a­tion. I worked around this based on advice I read some­where about upgrad­ing to remote desktop 8.1
Upgrade to RDP 8.1
To upgrade Win­dows 7 you need a total of 5 updates, installed in the cor­rect order. You may already have some of them installed.

1. kb2574819
2. kb2857650
3. kb2830477
4. kb2913751
5. kb2923545

Once these updates are installed (on both loc­al and remote PC), and you have restar­ted, you need to enable RDP8. This can be done 1 of 2 ways…
Run “gpedit.msc” and use group policy edit­or. The set­ting for RDP8 is loc­ated in Com­puter Con­fig­ur­a­tion-> Admin­is­trat­ive Tem­plates-> Win­dows Com­pon­ents-> Remote Desktop Ser­vices-> Remote Desktop Ses­sion Host-> Remote Ses­sion Environment->Enable Remote Desktop Pro­tocol 8.0.
Whilst edit­ing it would also be worth set­ting “Set Com­pres­sion Algorithm to RDP Data” to “Optim­ized to use less Net­work Bandwidth”
Altern­at­ively you can use a registry modi­fic­a­tion (use­ful on win­dows 7 home premi­um) in [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Ser­vices] set a dword called fServerEnableRDP8 to 1
Fix BSOD when sleep­ing, shut­ting down or restarting
After I had done the above I found my ses­sion freez­ing was cured. I also noticed that remote desktop went back ot not using Aero visu­als over RDP which is fine — I don’t need them for remote access. How­ever, I found that whenev­er I restar­ted, shut­down or sent to sleep the remote PC, it would crash with a BSOD ref­er­en­cing wdf01000.sys.
After much exper­i­ment­ing I found that a simple change to my RDP set­tings cured this BSOD. In the “options” for my con­nec­tion, I selec­ted the “loc­al resources” tab and unticked print­ers. I then clicked the “more” but­ton and unticked everything I found.
Since then I have been able to use RDP without crash or freeze.

In many ways I sup­pose this counts only as a work­around — I would be inter­ested to know about a prop­er fix, although I sus­pect this would require a hot­fix from Microsoft. I believe the crash­ing with RDP8 is related to an IRQ issue with USB. My best guess is that some kind of shar­ing of USB via RDP isn’t being closed cor­rectly dur­ing the shut­down pro­cess. If any­one has any more insight I would be interested

Got some thoughts of your own? Indulge yourself below by commenting! If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.