I logged into my Windows 10 Professional (1703) desktop from home yesterday, using Remmina on Ubuntu 16.04. I wasn’t surprised when my desktop wallpaper was black, I know it does this to save bandwidth, but when I returned to the office this morning my desktop was still black and, as it is set by the administrator via GPO, could not be changed.

Searching the Internet was not helpful on this occasion; so I have made this quick posts to help others.

It turns out that this is not some weird absence of wallpaper, but rather is a plain black wallpaper image, which has managed to get itself cached. The solution is consequentially simple - find and terminate said cached image.

1. Open File Explorer and navigate to %APPDATA% (you can type that into the top address/location field).
2. In the search box at the top right enter the text “Cache” (see image below).
3. Delete the cached version of the black wallpaper once it is found.
4. Sign out and then sign back in.

On my system the specific file location was:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\CachedFiles\CachedImage_1920_1080_POS4.jpg

Please do comment below if this was helpful, or if you needed to alter these instructions at all.

Following my recent post regarding Silverlight, unfortunately I have hit disaster.  When the audio starts, it sounds choppy with a double-echo or reverb.  In short it is unusable.  All other audio works fine, even on the same webpage, but as soon as you try and listen to a Silverlight widget it sounds terrible.

Googling “silverlight rdp choppy” in desperation has not filled me with confidence, there are a number of posts including:

• Has anyone else ran into a problem where if you use a Silverlight app over Remote Desktop and it plays a WMA or MP3 file using MediaElement, the sound is choppy?

It is possible that upgrading to Windows Server 2008 would resolve this issue; although there are issues I believe in connecting to the latest RDP version using rdesktop.

I did find this advice from Microsoft, the Microsoft RDP Client was the only sound card available, but I followed the advice anyway to no avail.

What I simply do not understand is why all other audio works perfectly via RDP, except Silverlight, especially given the fact that Silverlight and RDP are Microsoft products.

Any suggestions gratefully received!

FreeRDP is a fork of the rdesktop project that intends to rapidly start moving forward and implement features that rdesktop lacks the most.

For more information please visit:

• FreeRDP.