Windows 10: Windows 10 1903 dwm.exe high cpu usage after remote desktop session disconnected

When the remote desktop session ended, the Windows 10 CPU usage will jump to 25%-30%. The problem is caused by dwm.exe. If VMware server hosts many Windows 10 guests, it will cause VMware server runs in very high CPU level.

In order to solve the problem, the schedule task has been set up. Once the user disconnected from remote desktop session, the command: taskkill.exe /f /im dwm.exe will be run to stop dwm.exe process.

I believe this best way solve the problem.

The alternative is to disable WDDM display driver, back to SDDM driver.


For more detail steps, please refer to youtube:

How To Fix Windows 10 1903 High CPU Usage 'dwm.exe'

:)

 

DWM.EXE High CPU (One Core) On Target System after Remote Desktop Disconnect on Windows 10 x64 1903 (Fully Patched)

Two systems,

• Intel NUC with Iris Plus Graphics 655 running latest drivers 26.20.100.6890
• the other with Intel HD Graphics 2500 running latest drivers 5.33.48.5069

On completion of a remote desktop session, the target system shows high CPU utilisation (one core running at 100%) for DWM.EXE - the newer machine (Intel Iris Plus 655) will eventually crash several hours
later - I suspect a memory leak such as the previous one affecting QuickSync.



If I change the drivers to "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter" then things return to normal re: DWM.EXE. It's not a long term fix as one of the machines is my Media Centre PC and I lose audio output on
it, the other is a headless Plex server and I lose "Quick Sync" hardware transcoding.



Anyone else seeing this ? If so after a bit of digging I've identified a short term workaround.

I believe there is a problem with the Microsoft RDP code in 1903 (an area which seems to have had a major internal overhaul), and I document a successful workaround.



For clarity,

• the behavior started with 1903
• one system is an Intel NUC NUC8I7BEH PC with 16Gb Corsair Vengeance Memory and an Intel 760p 256Gb SSD; the other is a Chillblast Fusion Vacuum PC based on a P8H77-M motherboard. However other machines with nVidia GPU's are also affected, so this
  is NOT an Intel problem.
• my testing consists of using a third machine running Windows 10 x64 1903 (fully patched) to run the Remote Desktop client software. The "targets" I refer to are the two machines I mention acting as RDP Host machines. Both demonstrate the high CPU
  DWM.EXE after taking them over and then disconnecting (the NUC has an 8 core CPU so shows 12.5% CPU) and the other machine based on an Intel P8H77-M motherboard.

It seems Microsoft has done significant engineering to Remote Desktop in Windows 10 1903 and I now believe a significant bug exists in the Microsoft code.

• Windows 10 V1903 black screen with Remote Desktop

• These are the Removed and Deprecated Features on Windows 10 1903

In the first article a Microsoft employee mentions



<--------------------->

There’s a known issue with some of the old display drivers. <I believe the issue I am facing is related to this area>



Display drivers report some of their capabilities upon load. In previous Windows versions this reported data wasn’t used or verified. Because of that, some of the old versions of the legacy display
driver may report invalid data and it would be ignored. Starting with Windows 10 1903 RDP uses this data to initialize the session.



The best option is to install an updated display driver from the hardware manufacturer. If the new version is not available, you can workaround this by disabling the problematic driver in the device
manager.



Our team has identified the issue and we are currently verifying the fix that will dynamically switch to the software renderer if the problematic driver is detected.



I will this thread when the fix will be included to the Windows Insider release.

<---------------------->



Further testing in my environment has shown that machines without Intel integrated graphics are also showing the problem.



In the second article it mentions a change to the RDP driver area



<--------------------->

XDDM-based remote display driver: Starting with this release the Remote Desktop Services uses a Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) based Indirect Display Driver (IDD) for a single session remote
desktop. The support for Windows 2000 Display Driver Model (XDDM) based remote display drivers will be removed in a future release. Independent Software Vendors that use XDDM-based remote display driver should plan a migration to the WDDM driver model. For
more information on implementing remote indirect display driver ISVs can reach out to L: *** Email address is removed for privacy ***.

<--------------------->



As a workaround on all of my affected machines I have used Group Policy Editor to set



Local Computer Policy

Computer Configuration

Administrative Templates

Windows Components

Remote Desktop Service

Remote Desktop Session Host

Remote Session Environment

Use WDDM graphics display driver for Remote Desktop Connections

to DISABLED



This forces RDP to use the old (and now deprecated XDDM drivers)



After rebooting, behaviour returns to normal and after disconnecting from an RDP session the RDP host (target machine) no longer shows DWM.EXE consuming CPU.



This isn't a long term fix (to rely on a deprecated feature). I also don't understand why only a limited number of users are affected, but for now, I'm up and running again, and hoping for a Microsoft
fix.

 

dwm failure on rdp session in win 10

When logged in to a Win 10 pro system remotely from a Win 7 pro system, two instances of the dwm process are created. Only one appears when logged into the same system locally.

One of the two processes in the rdp session seems to be dormant, accumulating no cpu usage. However, the second dwm process seems to have an event processing thread in the dwmcore DLL that is hung in a tight loop, thus consuming a core of a multicore processor.

dwm version is 10.0.10240.16384...interesting versioning!

 

Remote Desktop - Screen resolution in remote session

I have connected to a remote desktop session and the windows in the remote session are all too small for me to see.

I have edited the remote desktop connection settings and cannot seem to make anything larger.

I am using a new Dell Inspiron Laptop which has a very high screen resolution 3840 x 2160

Any suggestions appreciated

Thank you