We are running a two server RDS solution for a client. Both machines are 2012 r2.
Occasionally, one of our clients' employees logs in and gets a black screen, and they are unable to do anything until we reboot the server. This is not feasible in a live environment, and a user can be shut out for the whole day before we can schedule the reboot
that night.
Here are some characteristics of the black screen issue:
- The screen is entirely black within the remote session.
- Pressing things like Ctrl + Alt + Del and Ctrl + Alt + End do not bring anything up. The mouse may briefly get an hourglass, so it seems like something might be happening, but the black screen doesn't go away.
- Forcing the user to sign out using administrative access does not resolve the issue.
- Deleting the account and recreating it does not resolve the issue.
- All our graphics drivers are up to date.
- Unchecking 'Persistent bitmap caching' does not resolve the issue.
- I've played around with group policy, and enabling and disabling UDP to various degrees. This does not resolve anything.
- We made minor progress by changing the display configuration in the Remote Desktop Connection app to a smaller size desktop (such as 640 x 480). The screen will sometimes (not always) appear, but only partially. Clicking the start button can cause part of
the screen to go black. Signing out from this degraded session didn't do anything, and this ultimately didn't get us any closer to resolving the problem.
- The black screen only ever happens to one user at a time, and it is the user given Session ID 114.
I've read only a couple other posts about session ID 114. There is no way to predict when an ID will be doled out to a user, and there is no method that I've seen so far that can completely prevent a user from getting a certain ID. The best workaround we have
to date is to create a dummy account, force sign out the affected user, and sign in with the dummy so it takes over that ID.
This only works until a reboot, when Session IDs will get reassigned. This also requires a failure in order to make the change, which is not an ideal situation.
According to this thread (https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/693490-black-screen-at-remote-desktop-login-to-server-2012-r2), the poster was in contact with Microsoft and they said there is no solution. I want this to be recorded in writing by Microsoft
itself if that is the case. If a solution or better workaround has been found, please let us know.