Remote desktop use two out of four monitors

I've recently upgraded my home workstation and now have four monitors on it. I work remotely most of the time and need some way to get remote desktop onto only two of those four monitors.

The top two monitors (monitors 4 & 3, going from left to right) each have a maximum resolution of 1680x1050. The bottom two monitors (1 & 2) each have a maximum resolution of 1920x1080.

In my .rpd file for this remote desktop connection, I have the following keys (I've clipped it for brevity) screen mode id:i:2 use multimon:i:1 desktopwidth:i:1920 desktopheight:i:2130 session bpp:i:32 winposstr:s:0,1,3,75,1655,675

Previously I was able to get away with just doing "mstsc /span" when I had only two monitors, but that isn't working now (and isn't desirable). I'd like for the new setup to only use two of my monitors. I don't really care which two. How do I alter the .rdp file to accomplish this?

Microsoft looks to have at least partially implemented this feature in the latest updates to Windows 10 MSTSC.exe using a .rdp connection file for a given server.

The key settings are

use multimon:i:1
selectedmonitors:s:0,1

As of now, selectedmonitors must be set from this file, but use multimon can also be set from command line or GUI.

To get a list of target monitors, you can use

mstsc.exe /l

to list current monitorIDs for use in your RDP file, results looking similar to:

Caveats:

1. You must select monitors that share a screen edge.
2. Some users report that monitorIDs change between reboots.

I use RDP full screened on 2 of my 3 monitors, my solution is actually really simple:

1. Setup a Windows 7 or 8 VM (I use VirtualBox and Windows 7 Ultimate)
2. Set the VM to use 2 of your 3 monitors and full screen
3. Setup your VPN and RDP connections on the VM (And have the RDP connection use all of your monitors (2 virtual monitors)).

That's it, kind of over the top, but it takes very little time to set up a basic Windows VM and is easy to start/suspend.

I use my 2 monitors do do dedicated work, and my third for entertainment/music/netflix/etc...

I too have been looking for a solution to this problem which can't be resolved by the windows RDP client.

I work mainly remotely via RDP in full screen mode with all my 4 monitors but would like a few programs to run locally.

Usually these programs would play music or video which is not suitable for the remote machine and I would keep them to one monitor.

So a simple hack for me is to force those programs to be "On Top" all of the time.

I am using Dexpot and just right click the program window and select "Always On Top".

Now even in full screen RDP mode I can view my program window.

This is unfortunately not possible. Believe me, I tried really really hard. There are articles saying that you can limit the number of monitors, but that does not work. Microsoft obviously didn't test the functionality at all and they can't be bothered to fix it.

Until they fix the bug, it is either one monitor or all of them.

I will try some alternatives and see whether I can come up with some third party solution that actually works, other than switching to Linux/VNC, that is.