MSTSC (remote desktop) annoyances in Vista
When pressing Alt-Tab to a remote desktop-window, the target window also register it as the ALT-key was pressed into that window. This is very annoying. (Alt-key is hanging and thus registered as pushed down and activates the menu at the RDP window).Can Microsoft please fix this. I do not see this problem when using Alt-Tab in Windows XP/2003.
November 21st, 2007 6:21pm

Hi, Thank you for your feedback. Do you mean the hot key Alt will be redirected to the remote session when you press Alt + Tab to the remote desktop window? Would you please provide more detailed information about the symptom and your environment for further research? I appreciate if you can capture some screenshots for me. Additionally, mstsc can control whether the hot key can be used on remote session. Please check if it meet your requirement: 1. On the Remote Desktop Connection dialog box, click Options 2. Click Local Resources tab. 3. Under Keyborad, select an option. Please try each option to see if it meets your requirement. Thanks. Sincerely, Joson Zhou Microsoft Online Community Support
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November 23rd, 2007 1:15pm

I have the same problem. My client machine is runnig Vista build 6000, if that matters. - I open the remote desktop connection dialog - I navigate to the Local Resources tab - For the field labeled "Apply Windows key combinations (For example ALT + TAB)", I select "On the local computer" - I click connect and connect to the remote machine (which is Server 2003) - When Remote Desktop is windowed (i.e., not full-screen) and has focus, pressing ALT+TAB switches to another window on the local machine (which is the behavior I expect) - When Remote Desktop is full-screen and has focus, pressing ALT+TAB brings focus to the menu bar of the active window in the remote desktop session, as if tab hadn't been pressed at all. (This behavior is broken) Oddly, when I press WINDOWS+TAB, I get Flip3D on the local machine, which is the correct behavior. The bug seems to be specific to ALT.
December 22nd, 2007 4:01am

It's been a couple weeks and I see no response. Do you have any news on this?
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January 10th, 2008 3:55am

Charles, thanks for your input. However I'm not sure it's related to my problem.My problem is as follows: I have several servers to admin, thus I cannot have them all full-screen. 1. I press Alt-Tab to go from the server window to e.g. Internet Explorer on my own computer.2. I then go back to the server window by pressing alt-tab, where e.g. tsadmin (tsadmin.exe) is active.3. When I release Tab and then Alt, suddenly the menu is active in tsadmin. It seem like tsadmin registered the Alt-button to be active, which was not intended by me. I then have to press ESC for leaving the menu and then I can move around in the tsadmin-window.This behaviour is not the same when I was using the same procedure in Windows XP as client.
January 23rd, 2008 5:00pm

Charles, Its been a while, have you heard any news on this? I am having this same exact problem in my environment. I have Windows 2003 servers and now deploying clients with Vista and the "On the local computer" feature does not work in Full Screen mode. It worked just fine with XP. Todd
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April 25th, 2008 11:40pm

Hi, Any update on this? After Windows XP Service pack 3 installation shortcut keys stopped working in MSTSC, i.e. I can't use Alt+Tab etc on the remote machine regardless what keyboard settings are used
June 6th, 2008 9:59am

No update i am aware of, but what i have experience recently regarding SP3 is that if you are using RDP files to access the apps, you may want to re-create them so they have all the options of the new RDP version. We were using files created back in RDP5 (XP native) version, and were getting a lot of security prompts etc... I have not heard yet if anyone is having hot key issues now like with Vista. Maybe i should go check...
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June 6th, 2008 5:22pm

No, I don't use RDP files. Start -> Run -> mstsc
June 9th, 2008 9:22am

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