Hello,

I am currently building a new Remote Desktop farm in Windows 2008 R2 with 2 hosts who holds the roles of Session Host, Web Access and Connection Broker (using DNS Round Robin and failover cluster management).

The client will be Thin Client starting an RDP session which gives them a full desktop, and also Windows XP and Windows 7 computers.
The Windows XP and Windows 7 computers will use the Remote Desktop farm to access some applications on them via the RD Web Access (using single sign on).

And here is the problem: when the users start a RemoteApp Program, and this is idle for more than 10 minutes, they get a lock screen and have to re-enter their credentials.

I know I could disable this by GPO (using loopback) by disabling the screensaver, but this will disable the screensaver for all users, including the ones who have a full desktop using a thin client.

The goal is to disable the screen lock for RemoteApp Programs only, but keep it for the full desktop users.

Extra info: users can sometimes log on to a thin client and receive a full desktop, or use RemoteApp Programs from a Windows computer with the same credentials.

I dont know if you can identify a remoteapp session in any way to configure settings, but this is the closest solution i know.

Create a group called RemoteApp and add users to it
Create a new policy RDS U_RemoteApp
Configure this setting:
User Configuration -> Policies -> Administrative Template -> Control Panel / Personalization -> Screen saver timeout
 
Set the value of Screensaver timeout to 0 seconds.
Apply a security filter to the GPO for the RemoteApp group

I had also thought about this solution, but the problem is there are some users who will need to use both the full desktop from a thin client and the RemoteApp Programs from a Windows pc.

Should be nice if this setting could be set only for RemoteApp Programs, but I didn't find anything about that.

Hi SMKN,

Thanks for the question.

However, as far as I know, I am afraid that there is no such setting could be applied only to RemoteApp programs for a same user. Therefore, you may have to extend the idle time or disable screensaver for all users.

Thanks.

Hi SMKN,

I would like to check if you need further assistance.

Thanks,

Hello Jeremy,

since there doesn't seem to be a way of detecting RemoteApp Sessions, I will have no other choice then make a choice between disabling the screensaver or having the RemoteApp locked after some time.

Thanks anyway for looking into this.