Windows keyboard shortcuts won't work in Remote Desktop

I'm fairly familiar with Windows remote desktop. Normally, I have "Apply Windows key combinations:" set to "On the remote computer" so that Alt+Tab, Win, etc. are all passed to the machine I'm connecting to.

At our company, I have my normal Windows workstation in my office (running Windows 10 Enterprise 1809). I often remote desktop into that machine from various conference rooms around our campus. In nearly all cases, when I have the "On the remote computer" option selected on the client I am connecting from, everything works as I expect.

Except in one specific conference room. No matter what I do, all keyboard shortcuts are handled by the client, and not the workstation I'm RDP'ed into. The specific client workstation is also running Windows 10 Enterprise (1709).

  • I've triple checked that I have the "Apply Windows key combinations" set appropriately.Remote Desktop Client Settings

  • I've saved the client RDP file and verified that the keyboardhook:i:1 is saved (in this case, to Default.rdp). I know this only controls defaults, and not the actual run-time behavior, but I tried launching directly from Default.rdp with no changes, and it still didn't work.

  • Other users don't have issues when connecting to their workstation from the same client.

So to summarize:

  • Windows key shortcuts work when I connect to my workstation from other clients (implying a client issue).
  • Windows key shortcuts work for other users connecting to their workstation from the same client (implying a server issue).

Sadly, the specific client causing me issues is very locked down by my company IT team (which is good - it's a shared computer), and I can't install or run anything that isn't there already (e.g. a different copy of mstsc.exe). It also means I can't see if ProcMon shows anything interesting :/.

Any ideas?

3 Reset to default

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