Thursday, May 18, 2017

keyboard - Windows: Why does the Alt Gr key does not work when an RDP session is running?

I came across some really strange behavior in Windows 7. I usually have open a remote desktop connection to another Windows (Win 7 or 10) machine. Nevertheless, I mainly work on the local machine. Everything, including the Alt Gr key works perfectly. Now let's say I lock my PC by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and unlock it again, the Alt Gr key just does not work anymore. I need to Alt+Tab to the Remote Desktop Window, then Alt+Tab back to some local program like some browser and - voilá - it works again.




This is a problem as some characters on a German keyboard can only be accessed by using the Alt Gr modifier key. When entering passwords I don't usually see what characters I type, so this causes failed login attempts.



Note that I already completely re-installed Windows on both the remote machine as well as the local machine and it does not seem to depend on which remote machine I am connected to. (However, I cannot tell if this also happens when connecting to remote machines running other OSes.) And, of course, when I am not connected to any RDP session, I don't have any issues with that key.



While researching on this issue I stumbled upon this link, unfortunately it does not provide a solution:
https://forum.devolutions.net/topic9714-altgr-key-disabled-by-rdm.aspx



Some (German) Microsoft help page suggested to switch the "Apply Windows key combinations" in the RDP settings to "On this computer" - however, it does not change anything.



Any further suggestions?

No comments:

Post a Comment

hard drive - Leaving bad sectors in unformatted partition?

Laptop was acting really weird, and copy and seek times were really slow, so I decided to scan the hard drive surface. I have a couple hundr...