RDP Freeze Fix - GlobalProtect

[brianhill88]

Hello,

We struggled with the RDP freezing issue with GlobalProtect for a long time.  The initial "fix" was to disable UDP for RDP in the registry.  This fixed the issue for many users but also slowed down the RDP performance.  We thought the issue was with GlobalProtect but after troubleshooting with Palo Alto we were able to see that at some point the remote PC just simply stopped sending RDP packets.

We opened a case with Microsoft and they gave us a registry fix to try that fixed all our RDP freeze issues and allowed us to re-enable UDP for RDP.

Important: This regedit goes on the machine you are remoting into, not the machine you are remoting from.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client

UseURCP (Create this new DWORD with value of 0)

You can use this from a command prompt as long as you have admin privileges on the box:

REG ADD "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client" /v UseURCP /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

If you previously disabled UDP for RDP you can re-enable it.

Hope this helps someone as this was a real pain for us and our users for a long time.

[kiwi]

Hi @brianhill88 ,

Awesome ! Thanks for sharing !!!

Cheers,

-Kiwi.

[fhewiufhwefhwe]

Thanks for sharing.  I hope this works.  I've been taking packet captures on the firewall and the machine remoting into to try to figure this out.

[David_Avery]

Thanks Brianhill88,

Your reg key seems to fix the issue. While my RDP client feels more sluggish I'm not experiencing the Freeze anymore.

To All, if you have a rule which only allows [ms-rdp {app-default}], you should consider adding an [any {udp-3389}] rule below it, this initially helped make my problem less frustrating but I would still experience freezes if I did the below:

If this helps anyone from Palo Alto Networks support if they come across this issue, I found in pcaps at the firewall that it was dropping RST packets from the remote terminal server (my windows 10 desktop in this case) when under heavy screen redraw load while trying to scroll wheel through either the start menu, a folder with large images and the view set to Extra Large Icons, or the way I could always force it to freeze would be to grab a full screen window such as my browser open to my pan firewall UI and flail it around the screen wildly. I would see a massive amount of TRANSMIT and FIREWALL stage (as expected with RDP Experience options set to everything on), then when it froze about three dozen of TCP,RST packets capped in the DROP stage.

In looking at the session through a second VDI connection to our Horizon View I noticed the UDP session showed this:

c2s flow:
source: <rd> [user_vpn-L3]
dst: <rd>
proto: 17
sport: 55450 dport: 3389
state: ACTIVE type: FLOW
src user: <rd>
dst user: <rd>

s2c flow:
source: <rd> [Inside-L3]
dst: <rd>
proto: 17
sport: 3389 dport: 55450
state: ACTIVE type: FLOW
src user: <rd>
dst user: <rd>

DP : 2
index(local): : 1203093
start time : Wed Jul 22 05:38:09 2020
timeout : 36000 sec
time to live : 35992 sec
total byte count(c2s) : 330115
total byte count(s2c) : 52126669
layer7 packet count(c2s) : 1926
layer7 packet count(s2c) : 42793
vsys : vsys1
application : ms-rdp
rule : davery-wfh-limited
service timeout override(index) : False
session to be logged at end : True
session in session ager : True
session updated by HA peer : False
layer7 processing : completed
URL filtering enabled : True
URL category : any
session via syn-cookies : False
session terminated on host : False
session traverses tunnel : True
captive portal session : False
ingress interface : tunnel.<rd>
egress interface : ae2
session QoS rule : N/A (class 4)
tracker stage l7proc : ctd err sw

end-reason : unknown

Sometimes I would see an unknown-udp session start on the same rule, as I suspect the client side was trying a new session start but most times I did not see that though.

Normally I would expect my second rule which follows this one 'davery-wfh-limited-1' which is not app-specific on port udp-3389 to pickup the traffic that was unknown-rdp and allow but it seems like whatever is happening in the packets that the appID engine is hitting a problem identifying and then the stream breaks. Since it's udp the client would just keep sending AND since the firewall was dropping the server side TCP RST packets, the client side was unaware the server side wants the session to disconnect and start over.

I've been dealing with this problem since probably October 2019 and my users have been very frustrated to say the least. It took me about 2 months to find that I needed the non-app specific udp-3389 rule, and most clients we ended up turning off UDP. Thanks again Brianhill88

[mhowsmon]

Thanks for sharing, this was driving me crazy.

[EUREKA-NETWORKS]

You can apply method 9 of the instructions detailed in the link below.

https://www.anyviewer.com/how-to/black-screen-on-remote-desktop-windows-10-jkzbj.html (Method 9. Close client UDP and disable WDDM driver)