The Windows 11 2022 Update has been in the Windows Insider program for about a year, allowing users to report as many bugs as possible so Microsoft can fix them before rolling them out to the public. Still, some bugs managed to slip under the nose. Microsoft has previously confirmed a litany of issues, including problems with printers, slow solid-state drive performance, poor copy performance for large files, and corrupt configuration files. Now, Microsoft is investigating complaints about remote desktop connection failures.
According to reports from regular customers and IT administrators posted on Microsoft forums and other social media, Windows 11 has difficulty connecting to Remote Desktop after upgrading to version 22H2. Symptoms vary from person to person and include connection failures, random disconnects, and freezing.
“All of our Remote Desktop users with Windows 11 are having problems connecting to Remote Desktop after installing this update. It just hangs when connecting,” a Windows administrator said on Microsoft’s community site.
“We found that the Remote Desktop client has a bug where it only attempts UDP connections and not TCP connections. Our firewall only allows connections on port 443 to pass.
“Windows 11 22H2 breaks remote desktop connections through the gateway. To me, this seems like a pretty big problem that is apparently being reported. Why wasn’t something like this fixed before it was released?” Another user said on Twitter.
“I have several customers using Windows 11 who are unable to log in to our RDS servers after updating 22H2. I tried not using the firewall and nothing changed. After rolling back the problem went away and they have been able to log back in,” a third person said on Microsoft Q&A.
Although Microsoft did not acknowledge the problem, a Microsoft employee revealed that the company is aware of the issues and is investigating the reports. In the meantime, affected customers are advised to roll back to the latest older version of Windows 11 or disable UDP connections to bypass the bug.
You can do the latter by creating a new fClientDisableUDP DWORD (set to a value of 1) in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services\Client. Alternatively, enable the “Disable UDP Client” policy in the Group Policy Editor. Those who are not satisfied with Microsoft’s latest operating system can uninstall Windows 11 22H2 and switch back to the previous version during the hesitation period after the system upgrade.
