Windows 10 Remote Desktop alt tab/Win+M problems

I basically don't use my own desktop to do the majority off my work, I RDP out to customers systems and work there. I tend to maximise the RDP session on to one of my screens and work exclusively within the RDP session.

What I've been struggling with since I installed Win 10 is that all the windows control function will sometimes not operate on the remote machine.

• Pressing the Win key will bring up the start menu on both local and remote system
• Alt + Tab flicks me back to my local running programs, no the ones on the remote system
• Win+Cursor keys mess with the RDP client window, not the windows running within the RDP session

I'm not convinced that this is specifically a Windows 10 issue, there are posts here that indicate the same issues going back to windows 7 (here)

However I never experienced this in previous versions of Windows and its driving me nuts.

• I have tried deleting and recreating my .RDP shortcuts.
• I've tested with 'Apply Windows Key Combinations' set to 'On the remote computer' or 'Only when full screen', neither make a difference.
• I'm RDPing from Win 10 (build 10240) to a variety of Windows versions including Server 2003 r2/Server 2008 r2/Server 2012 R2/Windows 7/8. There doesn't appear to be any consistency as to which ones are OK and which ones are not.
• I am exclusively RDPing to virtualised [ESXi] guests, not that that should make any difference

EDIT : For what its worth I've updated to build 10586.29

EDIT 2 : I've tracked it down to Synergy.

Solution 1:

If the above link does go dark, The above link describes how to fix for those unable to use alt tab or winkey shorcuts is a registry key to allow transparent key pass through of the keyboard to citrix.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICAClient\Engine\Lockdown Profiles\All Regions\Lockdown\Virtual Channels\Keyboard\TransparentKeyPassthrough

..

or in Windows 7/10 x64

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Citrix\ICAClient\Engine\Lockdown Profiles\All Regions\Lockdown\Virtual Channels\Keyboard\TransparentKeyPassthrough

Set the value to Remote and restart your connection

Either use the link in above comment or the one below, they are both similar. above taken from : http://jonwilliams.org/wordpress/2012/09/25/how-to-enable-alt-tab-in-citrix-remote-desktopreceiver/

Solution 2:

I am running Synergy.

It seems that there are issues with how it hooks 'special' keys and it keeps them local rather than allowing them to happen at the remote site.

As a bodge round I now have a small script that stops and restarts the synergy services which seems to work round it for 'a bit' (about an hour).

get-service synergy* | restart-service -force