Problem : RDP – The connection has been lost. Attempting to reconnect to your session

Problem : RDP – THe connection has been lost. Attempting to reconnect to your session

Certain computers on the same Lan, connected over a WAN via Remote desktop, to Server 2003 freeze every 2-3 minutes when idle.  It also freezes also nearly every time the remote session is dropped to the task bar when another application becomes the primary application used and RDP is running in the background.  Upon freezing, in about one minute, it will drop the connection, and then reconnect, with the above error message.    This problem does not happen if the remote session is in constant use, which is not pratical for our application, as it needs to sit for sometimes up to one hour idle.  All the time out settings have been maxed, but the connections won’t stay alive.  Two computers on the LAN have less of a problem than the three others which disconnect far more frequently.  They all go through the same linksys router.  The others can sometimes sit for 30-60 minutes without disconnecting.  One is even an XP Home machine, and the other a 2000 box, both run better than our other 3 XP PRO machines in terms of disconnection problems.  We increased bandwidth on the WAN, but no change, and DSL reports tell us we are only using less than 5% of our bandwith and still having problems.  To further confuse the matter, VNC and PCanywhere never have any disconnects, whether to the server 2003 or other workstations on the LAN at the same site as the server location, going through the same router on both ends.  We have checked our DSL connection, and there are no problems on either end.  We are not running a VPN right now, and wonder if this would improve performance or not make a difference. We have disabled firewalls, and this does not make a difference.  We have rewired our LAN but there are no connection issues there.  While we have this problem mostly from this office, we also have it from other remote sites — some sites are worse than others in freezing or dropping connections, and other locations have no problems at all.  The only thing I have not tired is a known good computer that stays connected at another site most of the other time (only some disconnections), such as a my laptop, connecting it from the site we have the most trouble.

Other things we have tried:  We have changed the experience to downgrade the speed of the connection, but this has not helped.  We took the screen saver off the server remote desktop setting to set it to none when it was set to 10 minutes.


Solution : RDP – THe connection has been lost. Attempting to reconnect to your session

As I see it your problem lies with the internet connection somewhere.
Freezing and such behaviour is clearly when connections is lost, so the error message is correct.

Short solution:
Try having a command prompt open (cmd.exe) with the command "ping -t <your 2003 server>"
or
Have the remote connection open a explorer window and load a page on a server in your network that has a meta-refresh active.

This short solution is about keeping your connection active even if it is minimized. This connection of yours seem to behave exactly like the old telephone connections that often disconnected when not using port 80 for a while.

Long term solution:
Because this seems to be idle-disconnect-problem, you have to find what is the cause. You have two possible causes as what I can see:
1)Linksys router  (many routers have hardware problems that can not handle to many open connections, so sometimes they have an algoritm for closing inactive connections down. Sometimes it just looses connections and those cases are more of a bug in the hardware)
2)Operator with hard limitations (some internet operators change ip-adresses very often, and each such change causes links to go down. Also some operators use the oldschool port80-idle-algoritms to save dsl-modem slots. In other words, if you dont use port 80 in a connection they close you down)

I would recommend that you try keeping a connection alive automaticly first to just confirm that you have a idle disconnect problem

And after that I would change router to another brand. I have had success stories where the only thing I did was change the router and everything was fine after that. They gave me a new router of the same brand for free, but that didnt work. Only when going for another brand it solved the problem.
But this was a while ago, so I will not list recommendations. Check with a good hardware dealer that has many brands in stock, and they will give you a good recommendation for a good router.

Also: try rebooting the router.. maybe it has a memory problem, and then it runs fine for some hours after a reboot (and then connection problems return after that)