Forum Discussion
For the love of all that is holy, fix RDP fullscreen
Hi, as title says.
Since the move from Win7, going fullscreen in RDP means diddly squat. I have an OLED display, so I have the taskbars set to hide on both my work laptop, as well as my RDP workstation. Problem is, if I connect to the workstation, fullscreen the window, and move my mouse towards the bottom of my screen, the laptop's taskbar pops up.
I have browsed a few forums of people complaining about this even in Windows 10 (can't confirm myself, didn't have hidable taskbar enabled then), but this is still a problem in 2026 with both PC's being fully up-to-date Windows 11 machines. This is beyond frustrating, I had to completely change my usage habits (I now have to press the Windows key if I need to interact with the Taskbar on my remote), which would have been a much lesser inconvenience if I could, hmm I don't know, move the taskbar to the side of the screen on the RDP session, but that ability has been taken away as well. Thanks Microsoft!
I want to also add this behaviour only occurs on secondary displays - using my laptop main display, the fullscreen function works as expected.
There are many frustrating things with Windows 11, this is just the one that is highlighted to me on the daily, and genuinely if my workplace did not rely on some Windows applications, I would have moved to any Linux distro a long time ago. Microsoft, get your act together, it has been half a decade of Windows 11, with no appreciable improvement in sight. I will believe the claims of K2 when I see them.
Rant part over, if some Microsoft employee or another poor tortured soul has a solution (that does not involve admin rights, it is work PC's after all) I am all ears.
5 Replies
When launching your RDP session, click on Show Options > Display tab.
Try lowering the display resolution or enabling "Use all my monitors for the remote session" if available.
Check the "Fullscreen" option and see if toggling "Smart sizing" helps.
Unfortunately I cannot change some of the settings as I don’t want RDP to use all displays, only the one I fullscreen the window on.
Why would I lower the display resolution, what’s the reasoning behind why this would work? If the fullscreen option is checked, it fills the entire screen, which is the desired behavior.
Will try toggling Smart Sizing but I don’t see why that would affect it either. As I said in the post, it works perfectly on the primary (laptop) display, just not on secondary ones, so my bet is some stupid taskbar logic being to blame.
Sometimes, moving the mouse to the bottom edge triggers system actions. You can check your display settings and disable any hot corners or edge gestures that might cause the taskbar to appear.
Yes, the system function is “unhide taskbar”…
The problem is the different behavior depending on whether the RDP session is fullscreened on the primary (laptop) display, or the secondary connected one. On the laptop display, the taskbar from the laptop does not get triggered when mousing to the bottom of the screen, the RDP one does. On the secondary, the local taskbar gets unhidden instead of the RDP one - explaining again just in case the post is not clear enough
Sometimes, moving the mouse to the bottom edge triggers system actions. You can check your display settings and disable any hot corners or edge gestures that might cause the taskbar to appear.
