Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Unable to logoff, disconnect, or reset terminal server user in production environment

I'm looking for some ideas on how to disconnect, logoff, or reset a user's session in a 2008 Terminal Server (unable to login as the user either as it is completely locked-up). This is a production environment, so rebooting the server or doing something system-wide is out of the question for now. Any Powershell tricks to help us with this?

We've tried to disconnect, log the user off and reset the session as well as killing the session's processes too, directly from the same terminal server (from the task manager, Terminal Services Manager and the Resource Monitor) with no results.

Help!


UPDATE: We ended up rebooting the server as no other attempts that we could think of worked. I'll leave this question open hoping someone might have more information about this one issue, and it's potential fixes

  • You can start a cmd, do a query session, check the id of the session to be killed and then do a reset session. For instance, if with query session you get that the session name rdp-tcp#1 is the one you want to kill, then you can execute reset session rdp-tcp#1 and get it killed.

    l0c0b0x : Thanks, but that didn't help either.
    From grem
  • Maybe there is a process still running, blocking the logoff process. Check the still running processes for the affected user. Then kill process one by one to see witch one is causing the problem.

    Check also the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Registry key that only needed Processes are started. In 64bit it is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.

    From quentin
  • I suppose the same happened today on my Win2008R2 Terminal Server. Sympthoms were: 1. He phoned me with "'connecting' message just hangs forever". He's just a simple user so I can't expect detailed problem description. 2. Tried logging off/resetting session (which usually helps in these cases) - did not work. The session still hangs in the list with 'disconnected' status. 3. Tried killing all processes for that user - did not help. Session persists and refuses to get killed.

    Solution was - connect as user (login with his credentials if you can reset his password or use some kind of remote assistance to see what happens on his computer) and see what happens in logon window. When connecting I clicked on RDP Client's 'details' button - and here it was, a error message that winlogon did something wrong, it was waiting for user to click on 'retry/ignore/etc' buttons and since it's the omnipotent winlogon it caused all that weird behavior.

    p.s. I could not found any way to really force kill a session :(

    From Andys
  • We just had a similar issue with our Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop server. The user session showed "Active" when looking at RDS Manager, but did not have the associated session ID# or connected device showing (both were blank).

    All of the tricks above did not resolve the issue. When connecting as the user in question, an error message came back stating that the Terminal Server was busy and to try again later or contact the administrator.

    We wound up rebooting the server as well.

    From

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