Fixing Copy/Paste for Remote Desktop Sessions

Question

Recently I have been working with Remote Desktop. I use it to access a virtual machine implemented through Hyper-V.

I have had many problems with the simple operation of cut-and-paste from my machine to the virtual one. The link between my clipboard and the remote clipboard is often broken. It is usual that this happens, when I copy/cut in the remote machine and then copy in my computer and then paste in the remote machine,

How to fix this?

(this is an auto-answering question, it is known that this can be done)

Answer 1

I have learnt how to solve it from this article:

http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/2007/01/18/fixing-copypaste-for-remote-desktop-sessions/

To make it short: You have to stop the application called rdpclip.exe in your remote machine. Then you go to Run, and write rdpclip.exe to restart this app. The link between the clipboards is recovered.

Reason: The clipboard implements what is called " clipboard viewer chain " and is application-controlled, that is to say, that every application that is added to this chain is responsible of passing on notification messages to the next viewer in the chain, there are apps that don't pass the messages and this causes the problem (in Vista is solved).

(there is a wider explanation here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ts/comments/1089729.aspx )

Answer 2

I've had a similar problem where copy/paste stops working and I couldn't even copy & paste on my local machine while Remote Desktop (RDP) Sessions were running. If I shut down RDP sessions then copy/paste functionality returned so it definitely appeared linked to remote desktop connections.

I found I was still running RDP v5.1. I've now upgraded to RDP 6.0 from Microsoft download and it appears to have fixed the problem.

So have a try at upgrading RDP and it may resolve the problem for you as well.

Answer 3

Huh, that's interesting. So when you're using remote desktop software, some apps just don't pass along the info, never knew that. Is this fairly common among applications or is it something that's relatively rare?