I received a new HP workstation last week at work, had to rush it into deployment because another one failed.  No sweat, I thought, same model, same build, there will be no issues. Uh hunh.

My user comes to me and tells me that he can’t RDP into the machine. Hmm, I thought, it has to be going into Power Save.  I check the settings. Oops, not it. Maybe he put it into hibernation. Guess again. Firewall? Nope… NIC? Scanned and 3389 is open. Hrm…

The event log showed “RDPDD.dll failed to load”. What? The conflict, it seems, is not really a conflict,  but session memory allocation for the driver for the nvidia video card. Odd since I requested an identical build out to the last one he had and that one actually worked out of the box. Not enough memory is being allocated for the RDP session since it shares it with display and print drivers. Solution, update the driver or do some registry diving. I chose registry diving, just to be sure, and because I wanted to leave the office without hunting and pecking for the right driver/version.

I added the following registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]

“SessionImageSize”=dword:00000020

Frustrating problem solved, and it really only took an hour or so.