In this post, I showed you how to create a shortcut that will allow you to log out of a Remote Desktop session and send the remote computer back to the desktop (XP’s normal behavior is to log you off, then leave the remote computer “locked”). Sadly, while this trick works with Server 2003 and XP, it doesn’t work with Windows Vista. Happily, I’ve just found out how to make it work with Vista… just right-click on the desktop and select New > Shortcut and type the following into the shortcut box:
tscon.exe RDP-Tcp#0 /dest:console
You then give the shortcut a name. From this point on, you can disconnect an RDP session by clicking on this shortcut, and the remote computer will exit RDP and return the remote machine to the console desktop. You must have admin rights on the Vista machine for this to work. And just for the sake of completeness, here’s the original command that’s compatible with XP/2003:
%windir%\System32\tscon.exe 0 /dest:console
Follow the same New > Shortcut procedure as above, and you can disconnect from an RDP session in XP/2003 and return the remote machine directly to the desktop.
Nope. Neither of these work.