Restarting Remote Desktop on Windows 2003

N.B. This entry pertains to the 2 seat terminal services instance that is enabled by allowing remote access in the system applet and not regular terminal services

In order to do this, you really need to restart the terminal services service, but it will be grayed out. You'll need to kill the appropriate svchost entry for terminal services.

1. tasklist /svc | findstr /I termserv

(note the process ID of the entry above)
an example output listing:

svchost.exe       8760  TermService

You'll need to forcefully kill the process with /F:

2. kill off the service using the PID above (in this instance, 8760 - your PID will vary!)

taskkill /F /PID 8760

3. Now, you can start it again:

net start TermService

Remote Desktop Clients, 32Bit Applications, and Windows 2008 R2

I recently ran into a problem with Remote Desktop Services on Windows 2008 R2 (formerly known as Terminal Services from Windows NT 4 through Windows 2008). The problem occurs when someone configures an RDP session that automatically launches a 32 bit application on connection. As you may know, Windows 2008 R2 is 64bit only. The problem I was seeing was that there was frequently a delay after exiting the application.

What should happen is that the RD session should drop after the application closes. What often happens is that the user sees a blue screen for up to two or three minutes, then the session completely drops.

I figured out the cause by using the Remote Desktop Services Manager. I launched a client session that launched the 32bit app upon login. I then closed the application, and the session hanged. Looking in the RD Services Manager, I noticed that there was a service from the session called "splwow64.exe." I killed that process, and the session dropped.

The Fix



The fix is pretty simple. It requires a regedit. Perform this regedit at your own risk! You should backup the registry before you start.

Navigate to the registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\SysProcs

Add the following 32 bit DWORD:
splwow64.exe

and set the value to 0

The fix worked instantly, at least for me. Your results may vary, of course. As far as I understand, you can create other dword values in there to terminate other programs that are stalling the exit of remote desktop sessions.

Apparently, splwow64.exe is used in thunking (in this context, converting memory addresses from 32 bit to 64 bit.)