I recently was working with a client that had an odd, yet steady issue – remote control of desktop sessions from the 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services Manager mmc console would disconnect the remote user when the administrator ended the session shadow.

After some research related to the issue, I found this to only occur with Windows XP RDP clients. Vista or 7 clients had no such issue.

Furthermore, it seemed to be related to some sort of RDP compression algorithm change. The default in R2 doesn’t play well with XP clients unless a hotfix is applied.

Instead of the hotifx from Microsoft (sorry…can’t remember the KB at this time!), just set the RDP listener to use a different compression method. Set it as shown below – click the thumbnail for the complete image.

After the change is applied, you will once again be able to shadow and disconnect from RDP sessions with no troubles!