I often use remote desktop to connect to my Windows 7 work laptop, to take advantage of my multi-monitor workstation without having to connect a lot of wires to my laptop. I recently upgraded my wireless access point, going from 54 Mbps to 450 Mbps (at least theoretically). Before this upgrade, I always used a wired LAN connection to RDP to my laptop, but with the new speed I figured I could try it over wireless.

Guess what? It did not work. Connectivity was there, it would even initiate the remote desktop connection, but it would either hang at the Windows 7 "welcome" message or the RDP session would go black almost immediately, terminating after ~30 seconds. Googling around, I found the solution: it has to do wth the fact that by default, Windows creates wireless connections on a per-user basis. Whenever you connect through RDP, the per-user connection gets dropped and re-connected, resulting in an RDP session that will never happen. So, what you need to do is re-create your wireless connection and explicitly share it between all users on your laptop. This setting cannot be changed after the connection has been configured.

So, what you need to do:

1. Ensure the wireless network profile type is set to use "all-user" profiles
2. Remove your wireless connection from Windows
3. Manually re-create it

For the first step, do the following:

• Open the "manage wireless networks" window (link on the left side in networking center)
• Click the "profile types" button in the buttonbar
• Select the "all users" option
• Click Save

Next step is to remove your current connection. If necessary, open the connection properties first and write down SSID name and security details you might need. Also, on the first tab of the property page, you can confirm the fact that your wireless connection is set up for just you. After removing the connection, manually add your wireless connection by clicking "Add" and selecting the first option to manually add a network profile. Fill out SSID and security details and make sure you set the connection to start automatically. That's it!