Overcoming RDP connection issues on Windows 11

The problem:

I faced an issue today where one of my colleagues was struggling to remotely connect to a Windows server via RDP.

He was using the default Remote Desktop app that comes standard with Windows 11 and everytime he’d connect, the application would hang at login. Something between 2 to 4 minutes, until he could finally type his password and access his remote machine.

Even after checking our firewall rules inside out, tracing his connections, nothing obvious could be found.

The checks:

I then decided to run a bunch of tests:

• 1st test – Connection from a Mac:

I tried accessing the remote server from my Mac using “Windows App”, no issues at all. The connection to the remote host works like a charm.

• 2st test – Connection from an old laptop running Windows10:

We still had an old laptop running Windows10 in the office, I wanted to give it a try. There again, no issue. The connection is lightning fast.

Even chatGPT was about to give up, after suggesting in turn, to check:
– IPv6 timeout
– Disable auto-redirect of local devices (printers, drives, smart cards…)
– Reverse DNS lookup delay
– Kerberos delay
– Windows Defender
– Power throttling
– …

It turns out that none of these suggestions actually worked.

As I am writing this article, I am still not sure what the root cause is. For sure, it is the Windows Remote Desktop application that either waits for a timeout of some sort or another child process preventing Remote Desktop to initiate the connection in a timely manner.

I’d put my 2 cents on Windows Security having to do with the problem, but I can’t really prove it at this stage.

The Solution:

Just do no use Remote Desktop with Windows 11 🙂
I downloaded MobaXterm, opened a RDP connection to my remote host and it worked right away.

Yes, sometimes you just spend a lot of time trying to fix stuff… until you realize there isn’t much you can do about it.