Can't copy and paste in Remote Desktop Connection session

Is it possible to copy and paste inside a Remote Desktop Connection session?

Assuming you're talking about Windows Remote Desktop Connection — before you hit Connect, click Options to expand the RDP connection window.

• Click the Local Resources tab. Under Local devices and resources, click More.

• In the new window, click Drives. Click OK to close.

• Go back to General tab and click Save to save the settings for next time.

Barring any weird settings on the server side, you should be good to go.

Even when you have the "Clipboard" option enabled, you may still have problems!

If that's the case, use Task Manager to kill and restart the rdpclip.exe process on local and remote machines.

More details on this blog post …

The only way I really knew to fix the clipboard transfer was to close my session and restart it. That meant closing the tools I was using like Visual Studio, Management Studio and the other ancillary processes I have running as I work and then restarting all of it just to restore the clipboard. But today I found a good link on the Terminal Services Blog explaining that what is really happening. The clipboard viewer chain is somehow becoming unresponsive on the local or remote system and events on the clipboards are not being relayed between systems. It is not necessarily a lock being put in place but some sort of failed data transmission. It then goes on to explain the 2 steps you can take to restore the clipboard without restarting your session.

Use Task Manager to kill the rdpclip.exe process
Run rdpclip.exe to restart it

… and a pretty ridculous "explanation" from Microsoft.

Summary

If you have a shared clipboard problem, see if the following troubleshooting guide helps:

+--------------------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Symptom                  | Possible Cause          | Possible Solution            |
+--------------------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Remote-to-local copy and | RDPCLIP is not in the   | Kill and restart RDPCLIP.    |
| paste broken.            | clipboard viewer chain. |                              |
+--------------------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Local-to-remote copy and | TS client is not in the | Close the TS client and      |
| paste broken.            | clipboard viewer chain. | reconnect to the session.    |
+--------------------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| RDPCLIP or the TS client | There is a loop in the  | Kill and restart RDPCLIP.    |
| is using excessive CPU.  | local or remote         | If this does not fix the     |
|                          | clipboard viewer chain. | problem, close the TS client |
|                          |                         | and reconnect to the session.|
+--------------------------+-------------------------+------------------------------+

I struggled with this one... until I realized rdpclip.exe was a program running on the RDP session machine and not my local machine.

Once on the right machine, killing and restarting fixed it for me.