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

Basically I have a headless Windows 10 server that I use RDP to access. Up until 1903's installation it's been fine but after installing 1903 I was only able to log into a black screen with a cursor until the system forcibly disconnects. I tried a couple of things (like disabling persistent bitmap caching), which produced nothing useful, and ended up rolling it back to 1809, where it resumed working. None of the other PCs where I installed 1903 exhibited this behavior (connecting properly when an RDP request is made, including another headless server).

I'll accept that I have to use 1809 on this system for now but what I'd like to know is how do I know when it might be safe to try and update it to 1903 again? It isn't 100% necessary for me to run 1903 on this system but I like having all my systems running at the most up-to-date baseline as a matter of principle.

I've encountered the same problem. Is yours a very old display adapter? If so, it may simply be that there is no longer a display driver that is compatible any longer.

To work around it I did this:

Open Device Manager on the problem system. Disable the display adapter.You will need to do this while connected to a monitor. This will force the system to use the standard Windows display driver. Note that you may not have an option to set the screen to the full resolution of your monitor at this point, but when connecting via remote desktop, it should work fine with the full resolution. In my case, this was an acceptable solution since I run the system headless.

I did reinstall the display driver from Intel (it’s an Intel HD 4000 integrated GPU) but I didn’t try outright disabling it.

At the moment it’s still back on 1809, though, which works.

- - - Updated - - -

Sadly that didn't work. I tried updating one last time using a different method and I disabled the entire display adapter and RDP still failed to work afterwards.

So downgrade again...

hsehestedt said:

I've encountered the same problem. Is yours a very old display adapter? If so, it may simply be that there is no longer a display driver that is compatible any longer.

To work around it I did this:

Open Device Manager on the problem system. Disable the display adapter.You will need to do this while connected to a monitor. This will force the system to use the standard Windows display driver. Note that you may not have an option to set the screen to the full resolution of your monitor at this point, but when connecting via remote desktop, it should work fine with the full resolution. In my case, this was an acceptable solution since I run the system headless.

This was the only thing that worked for me, but there was an issue. I have a 1940 x 1080 display and the resolution is not 1440 x 900, but still look good.

rdwray,

You are correct. As I had noted, it may not run there full native resolution locally, but you should be able to get the full resolution via remote desktop. Since that is a headless unit hopefully that will work for you as it did me until some other resolution comes along.

hsehestedt,

There are a lot of PCs out with AMD and NAVIDIA displays, M$ should be getting a lot of bad words shouted at them about now.

Don't misunderstand, this is by no means an issue with all of these displays. It's only a very small subset of very old adapters for which the manufacturers have not made any current Windows 10 drivers.

I would go so far as to say that Microsoft is really blameless in this one. I'm betting that like me, you probably have a display driver that has not been updated in many years.

Uh, everything worked before the update, so why doesn't it work now?

We had the same issue when they went from the IDE to the SATA hard drive.

Well, MS is offering me the update in Windows 10 directly now. Dunno if it's been fixed now.

Seems risky.

Microsoft has FINALLY acknowledged the issue, despite my complaints having been there since launch day.

Unacceptable. How does this go on for so long without mention?

Oh, and yes, the issue returned even with MS's official update.