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I'm using TightVNC in a classroom situation, and I want the little pop up notification to appear on the students PC's letting them know when the teacher has remoted into their machine or is monitoring them.

However, that pop-up message indicating the teacher's PC name and that they are connected, does not consistently appear on all the machines when a connection is made.

I can't find any controls in TightVNC Viewer, Server or in Windows 7 that appears to control this. Any assistance finding and enabling such a control, or even finding a third-party plug-in that will serve the purpose, would be appreciated.

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1 Answer

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This is governed by the registry keys at

HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\Default\
QuerySetting (REG_DWORD)  ` should be set to 2
QueryTimeout (REG_DWORD)  ` timeout in seconds before applying the default action
QueryAccept (REG_DWORD)   ` Accept connection by default if no response to query window

If you're finding that it doesn't work for some users, it may be because they have conflicting values configured in their profile (HKCU\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\Default).

I had similar issues with UltraVNC a few years ago. You might want to check and see if some of the troublesome users/machines have another VNC server installed which might be setting those same registry values.

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Thank you or your response. I see the picture that you added, but I'm not sure where or how to look on the computer to see it. I know that the IT department in our company uses "Dameware" to remote in occassionally,...I'm not sure if that might be the issue or if so, how to resolve it. Also, I've occassionally accidentally had TightVNC Server running more than one instance simultaneously. Again, if that's the case, I'm not sure where to look or how to resolve it. Also...can you tell me...if the pop up message generated by "tightvnc server", or is it generated by "Windows 7"? – BJR Mar 17 '12 at 15:21
I didn't put a picture in my answer - just a list of registry keys listed in a code block. I have never used Dameware, so I don't know if that could have an effect on VNC. I wouldn't have thought so. If you have more than one instance of tightVNC server running, only one of them will be able to bind to the default VNC port, so only one of them will be reachable at a time. You can see how many instances are running by looking at the running processes via tasklist.exe or in task manager. The pop-up message is generated by VNC, not Windows itself. – Adam Thompson Mar 18 '12 at 1:48

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