For the last few months I’ve been plagued by the inability to at times remote desktop to some of my Windows XP based system. While not critical, it is nice to be able to connect home and carry on working on a document/email I was busy with before departing to work.
After some hunting, I narrowed the culprit down to the Nvida graphics drivers post version 169.39. Driver Release 175.16 was the first to show the issue, 175.19 made it worse.
My solution at the time roll back 169.19 and sacrifice some of the support for my CUDA enabled cards. Last week I took the plunge and went for 178.13, which while resolving some other issues still broke the Remote desktop functionality.
The solution appears to be a tweek is needed in ones registry.
- Start, Run, type regedit and press OK
- Navigate to the Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
- Right click in the Details pane and Select New –> DWORD Value
- Name it SessionImageSize
- After it is created, double click on it and change its value to: 20 ( this is based on recommendations from here) and effectively maps to raising the session memory to 32 MB.
- Save and Reboot
I tried this and no luck. For my particular configuration SLI motherboards with Running 3 heads ofa 7600GT and 7300GS, I needed to raise the SessionImageSize value to 41 implying the use of 64MB of memory. I’m not sure if this is due to the large amount of ram in the system ( 4gigs) or the particular use of two non SLI’d cards. the ‘default’ value of 20 seems to have solved the problem on my other Intel based system running a single 8500GT.
Microsoft take on the issue is contained in KB886212 which proposes the solution of try another driver or rollback the driver.
Searching for “SessionImageSize” in the Microsoft knowledge base doesn’t seem to help either
Its worth nothign that the problem is occuring across different chipsets, Graphics cards, and on both SP2 and SP3 systems. The fix of increating the SessionImageSize to 0×41 seems to be working fine on a Windows Server 2003 (SP2) system as well.
