(Reproducible) mouse appearance corruption using Remote Desktop after short idle time on host

Question

I have had many PCs over the years, and I remote desktop into lots of PCs. I have a bug that no one seems to have reported, or have reported similar issues that never get fixed.

The APPEARANCE of the mouse cursor on the remote computer get corrupted, though it continues to function fine. Not the black box that a few have reported, but other, more random appearance issues, like dots all over the cursor or weird thick borders, or the cursor reverts to the default very small cursor I can't see.

I have one monitor, so it's not caused by that, though it happens with multiple monitor setups, too. I do run my host DPI high, 175% or 200% at times (new way not old), and the remote desktop is enlarged, too, I think maybe it's using the host DPI automatically??

To reproduce, do this:

1. in the remote PC, use a larger cursor than normal (not sure this is necessary).
2. switch back to the host PC for several minutes, but not long enough to cause it to sleep.
3. do stuff on the host PC actively
4. switch back to the remote desktop.
5. Mouse cursor will get be corrupted about 20% of the time.

About 5 times a day this happens, on ANY PC, and the quick fix is to open Settings and change the cursor size, which immediately fixes it.

I once heard someone say this might happen if the RD version is mismatched between server and host, though it's happened for years and I have all updates, and the admin says they do, too. Basically any change to the cursor appearance will fix it, through this is time consuming and annoying as heck.

Anyone see this? Have a solution? I'd even settle for a batch or Powershell command I could execute instead of manually opening Settings, searching for mouse size, changing it. Even keeping Settings open on the mouse page seems to be buggy as Settings is a buggy app that likes to reset randomly back to its main page. Arrgh!

Again, this happens on ALL PCs I've ever used, host and remote, across many companies. And it's not terribly hard to reproduce, although there are periods where it stops happening for a day or two.

Answer 1

Hello,

You can try setting the displays as follow when you are using high DPI Screen:

(Image source: Small or missing mouse pointer in RDP session: SOLVED | Microsoft Learn)

In addition, mouse cursor pointers settings are stored in user profiles, so you can switch users to login RDP and check if the issue occurs on all users or specific user. If it only occurs on specific user, you can delete the problematic user profile and reconnect to the remote session to create a new user profile.

I hope this helps.

Best regards

Answer 2

I'll try that in a few weeks, thanks.