Remote desktop multimonitor order changing.

Question

I have an operator station that has 4 screens and is connecting to a VM using remote desktop. it is setup to use only 3 of the 4 monitors. I have identified the right monitors using mstsc /l and modified the RDP file using notepad and it works well.

For some reason, once in a while, the order of the screens changes. Looking at the pixel positions, initialy for it to display the right order, I had to put in 0,1,2 as the monitors in the RDP file. After a month or so, I got a call from the operator saying that his display was messed up. Running mstsc /l and looking at the pixel positions, I had to switch the RDP files to 0,2,1 as the order. This week, I had to revert it to 0,1,2.

Any idea why/how the order of these display would change? The VM is running on a windows server 2019 and the operator station is running windows 10 pro.

Answer 1

I'm seeing exactly the same behaviour with a win11 23H2 guest VM running on a win10 22H2 host.

Screen order seems to flip 0,1,2 to 0,2,1 back to 0,1,2 each time the RDP session in minimised/restored.