Disabling the MRU/most-recently-used computers in Remote Desktop

• Posted by ploft on July 17, 2008
• 1 comments

Here is a small trick to avoid the Remote Desktop Connection client (RDP/mstsc) from saving the latest computers you’ve established connection to.

If you are afraid of tinkling with regedit and have to look up what ACL stands for, I wouldn’t recommend trying this.



1. First of all open up regedit and browse to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default

2. Now delete all MRU’s or correct MRU list to you requirements, for example you can choose to have a couple of fixed servers that always should appear in the MRU-list – poormans favorites.


3. Next right-click the Default-key (the Default-folder in the registry-tree), and choose “Permissions...”


4. You have to remove the “Full Control”-permissions for your useraccount and groups your account is member of. In my example as I’m a local administrator on my computer I had to remove “Full Control” on both “Administrators” and of course “Peter Loft Jensen”.
Now the mstsc/RDP client can’t write any new MRU’s.


5. Access the current user’s document-folder: “C:\Users\plj\Documents”. Here you will find the “Default.rdp” (it might be a hidden file). This file contains your default settings in remote desktop like resolution and color depth. Open properties for Default.rdp, and make sure “Read-only” is checked.

That should be it, now your MRU and default-server isn’t saved (because it’s not allowed by the ACL’s).

The first time the Remote Desktop Client tries to save these settings it complains it can’t, but I’ve only seen it do this the first time, and I’ve verified this on my laptop as well.