RDP connection dropping randomly and intermittently

Hello All,

This is my first post here, although I have visited the site a few times and found some really good help. So thanks to all those who have helped me and did not know it. However, I have an issue that simply googling is not helping me with.

I am in a corporate environment where RDP is used everyday for many different tasks. For this project I am dealing with RDP between 2 Win 7 Pro machines across the board, no servers. What we have started noticing is the connection will suddenly drop, randomly, with just the message that you have been disconnected. This can happen after just logging in or an hour after or anywhere in between. There does not seem to be any set amount of time before the connection drops and of course it is able to be reconnected without issue. The connection speed seems to be fine. All of these machines (42 RDP hosts in total, client machines ?, a lot?) are on a gigabit network with fiber backbone. I have clocked speeds of 700+ mbps, so I feel safe saying it is not the network, or at least the speed. What I have found using wireshark to monitor port 3389 is a few bad packets at the time of one drop, another connection loss yielded a zerowindow message and the third time was with two PCs, identical to one another in hardware and software, that are actually on the same switch, could not be closer without a crossover cable, the connection lasted about 30 minutes and when it dropped wireshark showed nothing bad, no lost packets, no zerowindow, nothing.

What I have tried so far is confirming the settings of RDP policies (all pertinent policies were "not configured"), changing the autodetect option to both highrestricted and low I believe, based on the zerowindow message. which also led me to try it on 2 identical machines as I came across someone who spoke of having an issue where the host PC is just faster overall than the client. Which is the case here as the hosts I am dealing with have 2 Intel Xeon cores, 256G of ram in some cases (64G and 512G in others) and all have SSD drives for the OS. The client machines the users are RDP'ing into the hosts with vary, but none match the hosts power, unless, as in the case above, I am using two of the machines to RDP.

I am sure I am leaving out details that would be useful to someone who is gracious enough to try and help. I will say I am in a very compartmentalized environment and rather new here, so still learning. Yet, I am the swiss army tech, jack of all trades, master of none. It is the most interesting IT position I have had yet. Thank you in advance to whoever tries to help.

I am always happy to help if I can. Thanks for the response. Reconnecting doesn't seem to be an issue and really losing the connection does not affect the data in question at all as the session disconnects but remains active. It is just an annoyance for the users. I did check that reconnect is set though. Good point about the version. I don't know what version just yet, but I do know that all of these machines were imaged, by me, from the same stick and then they all go through the same core load process for the rest of the setup, so they all should have the same version of RDP. Although seeing there is a version 8 for Win 7 does make me wonder if that can eliminate the issue. Something to look into at least. Thanks again. If you have any other ideas, please share. Or if I can offer anything, just ask. Okay, just found it.

To open Remote Desktop Connection, click Start, point to All programs, point to Accessories, point to Communications, and then click Remote Desktop Connection.

The Remote Desktop Connection dialog box appears.

Click the computer icon in the upper-left corner of the title bar, and then click About.

I seem to be running 6.3

I have a few hot potatoes at the moment so I will be trying the update to 8.1, but that will probably be a Monday problem now. I wouldn't think the versions would matter as long as they match and all these machines should have the same version.

Yeah, that is a bit confusing, especially the last line "Remote Desktop Protocol 8.1 Supported" and mine says the exact same. Does that mean it is version 8.1 or JUST supports it? Well, I can say this, M$ wanted 500.00 dollars to address this issue as RDP is not warranty covered. If I learn anything else, I will pass it along. Misery loves company. Thanks again.

I did attempt to install the RDC update (KB2923545) but was informed it had already been installed.

I don't know for sure this actually did anything, but we set the NIC and network port on the switch for full duplex gigbit permanently and lo and behold, the RDP connection lasts an hour at times. Not sure if the change had any effect or just the state of the network at the time, but there is a difference. Maybe this will help someone else, as i can not find any solution to my issue.