Question

A user was working from home and had a colleague turn on her computer so she could remote desktop to it. All worked fine, but when she came into the office and used her computer for a while then locked it the computer icon had a red screen, instead of blue. Like in the following mockup:

^{Mockup of red computer screen.}

It didn't cause any problems and it went away when she rebooted, but I was intrigued to find out whether there was something that caused it or if it was just a windows oddity. I believe she just closed the remote desktop session (without really logging off) from home and then disconnected from the VPN before coming to the office. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I have found that the act of using Remote Desktop Connection to connect to a Windows XP machine changes the color of certain application icons. For instance, the file manager I use has an orange application icon. When I connect to a machine that has this app running, the icon turns blue. When I eventually get back in front of that machine, and log in directly, the icon is still blue and stays that way until I restart the app.

Perhaps this is a similar issue? Just another display artifact introduced by Remote Desktop Connection. FYI, I have been remote connecting to more Windows 7 machines than XP machines lately and have seen no such anomalies.