VMWare, RDP (MSTSC), WPF, and DisableHWAcceleration
I don’t know if you, like me, have a development box running Visual Studio 2010 and VMWare workstation. I develop in C# and WPF, and test the product in a VM. Then sometimes, when I work from home, I remote desktop into my development box.
When I am using RDP to remote control a VMWare Workstation host, and I run a WPF Application inside a VM, the WPF application doesn’t display. The window opens, and you see the frame of your windows, but the inside is just blank or a white/gray box. None of the WPF Controls are visible.
I have found two ways to fix this. One is permanent and one is temporary.
Option 1 – (Permanent) Set this registry key. Read more about this here on MSDN: Graphics Rendering Registry Settings
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics] "DisableHWAcceleration"=dword:00000001
Option 2 – (Temporary) Or just reboot the VM while connected to the VMWare Workstation host via RDP. It seems that the VM boots and the OS detects the lack of support and disabled hardware acceleration. However, once you reboot when you are not RDP’ed into the VMWare Workstation host, you have hardware acceleration back.
I took me a long time to figure this out, because there was little to nothing in a Google search. I came across this solution while looking for something else a month or so ago, and needed to use it again when working from home last night. I thought I would post it so I never have to look for it again.
I've been read everything and trying every fix to solve this for a few days now, from hotfixes to driver updated and framework reinstalls, even using Ericom's HTML5/websocks based remoting. It all works fine to our other servers, just not the 2 marketing laptops that really matter.
I saw the reg hack early on but it specified current user rather than HLMK. I'll give that a try in the morning and update you.
Regards
Derek