Terminal Services can be a pain.

Earlier this afternoon I logged onto my home computer via Remote Desktop (AKA Terminal Services) to do some work on this very blog.  I have a port forwarded through my firewall and then a domain set up with dynamic DNS.  Just an average setup by anyones measure.  My system is nothing out of the ordinary either; XP 32 bit running on a Gigabyte system board with 4GB of PC2-8500 and a Core 2 Duo E8500.  It’s fast enough for me.  The graphics card is a PNY Geforce 9600GT hooked up to an Acer AL2216W (22″ wide LCD – Primary) and a Dell M783s CRT for a little extra desktop room.  I also happen to have a RAID0 array with another drive for my page file.  None of this actually matters though, so let’s get down to the brass tacks here.

When I got home, nothing worked.  My computer was unresponsive like a heroin OD victim… keyboard and mouse input were ineffective.  There was just two blank screens and no login window.  The system was running, so I moved over to my laptop and fired up Ubuntu’s Terminal Server Client which got me right in.  I recalled at this point that windows had popped up several [display] driver signing prompts, all of which i dismissed because I hadn’t changed anything hardware wise.  No idea what caused those.

I figured if I logged out maybe Terminal Services would release my screens and allow me to use my console again, so I did so but it didn’t work either.  Next I restarted – nothing.  I logged back on via RDP again and deleted my display adapter and monitors out of device manager and restarted.  I had to issue the “shutdown -r -f -t 00″ command because you can’t shutdown with the normal GUI except with task manager in some cases.

This last part did the trick – I was greeted with a low-res login window and had to reinstall my display drivers and reconfigure my desktop settings.  I don’t know what caused this issue, but it was just one more thing to deal with today.