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stochastically
Copper Contributor
Jul 31, 2021

Intermittent failure to connect to Windows Server 2016 via RDP, "An internal error has occurred"

When connecting to my Windows Server via RDP from Windows 10, occasionally the connection fails with error message "An internal error has occurred", see attachment.  This has been going on intermittently for many months.  Usually the RDP connection succeeds but then once the error occurs it will keep happing for a few hours, with perhaps a few successful connections, before somehow clearing itself and then the error won't be seen again for several or more days.  I have been using RDP to connect to various servers for well over 10 years, and this only started happening within the last year or so.

Various results can be found when googling for solutions to this problem, e.g.   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/300054/remote-desktop-connection-an-internal-error-has-oc.html .  I tried all the suggested solutions on that Microsoft answers web page, but none provided a permanent solution.

One of the suggested solutions on that Microsoft Answers web page was to set â€˜Require use of specific security layer for remote (RDP) connections’ in group policy to "RDP".  That's dangerous from a security point of view, and also didn't work consistently for me this morning.  Apart from that issue, RDP is a connection mechanism that is widely used, so a proper secure solution to this problem is required.

If anyone knows how to fix this then please let me know.  However, at this stage it feels more likely to me that there's a bug in RDP that needs to be fixed my Microsoft.  How can I bring that to the attention of the relevant team, and perhaps get an estimate of when the bug might be fixed?  Needless to say, having been programming computers most of my life, I'm appalled that such an unhelpful error message is part of RDP.  Error messages should be helpful and tell users how to cure the problem.

Paul


P.S. I've had this error message when connecting to my Windows Server 2016 (standard OS) from several recent versions of Windows 10, including the latest version 21H1.

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