Remote Desktop broken on Windows 10 1903, but only on one PC...

There is a solution and it doesn’t involve the display adapter or it’s drivers. The video card makes no difference as long as it has basic or Win 10 drivers.

As you might recall installing 1903 (WIN 10) on an older PC with certain chipsets resulted in a black screen while using RDP. This is a known issue, discussed by Microsoft as late as July 12th and still awaiting the fix (promised for July-August). The black screen issue has to do with a new RDP display driver (WDDM) used in 1903. The “fix” forces the old XDDM driver to be used. From what I understand, it isn’t just the display adapter that causes the issue with affected chipsets, so putting a new video card in the machine or using a generic driver won’t help (and it didn’t for me).


Easy fix! Use GPO to force use of XDDM rather than WDDM. On the affected machine, in Group Policy Editor, under Remote Desktop Session Host -> Remote Session Environment ... set the policy “Use WDDM graphics display driver for Remote Desktop Connections” to DISABLED.


Has worked for me on three machines so far. No side affects that I see. Once MS issues an update you can reverse the fix and use WDDM.

Interesting.

Tempted to try that but I don't want to do it until I'm actually AT the offending computer so I can hook a screen to it and roll it back if all goes wonky (I'm RDP'd into it right now so I like that it works).

I don’t recommend doing the edit via RDP as you need to do it post upgrade..... which is somewhat problematic. All my boxes were on a KVM, so I was able to do the edit in the server room without any additional hardware. Worst case, you can always roll back to 1809, as I did many times until I found the correct solution.

Thanks man. Worked like a charm!!

Thanks Charlieo - that works for me....

What is the registry setting for Charlieo's "Use GPO to force use of XDDM rather than WDDM."?

Thanks CharlieO - this worked for me.
Had to find the setting in Group Policy under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > All Settings
No more blank screen hang on W10 PC; disconnected sessions can reconnect from various clients e.g. PC, Android, iPad.