We're running a single RDS setup with Windows Server 2016 Standard and about 2 weeks back we started to experience Windows Start Menu and Taskbar issues where these functions would suddenly stop working for all of the RDS users. We are not using profile disks and each user connects to the RDS via our gateway server and their profile is stored locally on the RDS server. No desktop or Start Menu redirection is setup. We have 25 RDS CALs and there's normally about 20 users logged into the RDS server. The server is a physical server running a 12core Intel CPU with 32Gb of RAM and an NVME SSD Intel disk.
The desktop apps like Microsoft Office will continue to function fine but if you minimize the running apps, the user can not click on the minimized apps as the Taskbar doesn't respond along with the Start Menu. The only thing that currently works is to logout the user session using Task Manager or to reboot the server. When the user reconnects and gets a new session, the Start Menu and Taskbar will work for several hours before it goes back to the locked state.
I have read quite a few posts and I have re-installed the Windows apps with the following PS script:
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}
I have run a full sfc /scannow and checked the health of the windows image. These all complete fine without issue.
Tonight I have found some older posts from 2017 about Server 2016 RDS black screens that are caused by duplicate Windows firewall rules getting created for each user every time they login. While we don't have the black screen issue, I'm wondering if our issues with the Start Menu and Taskbar could be related to this same duplicate firewall rules for each user. When I checkedHKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy\RestrictedServices\Configurable\System on our RDS, I am seeing thousands of entries.
Does anyone know if these duplicate firewall rules can cause the Start Menu and Taskbar issues? If so, what's the proper way to delete them?
Thanks for any input.
Ken