Setting Wallpaper for a Remote Desktop Session


Ah, the fun I had trawling around trying to find out how to set the wallpaper on a remote desktop session! The (seemingly) most obvious answer was changing the Wallpaper setting under Desktop in a GPO, but no. That setting explicitly states that it doesn't apply to RDP sessions, so back to the registry we go...

I'm presuming here that we want these settings to apply to all the computers within a specific OU rather than to individual users.


  1. Create a new GPO "Wallpaper"
  2. Navigate to Computer Config/Policies/Admin Templates/System/Group Policy
  3. Set "Configure user Group Policy loopback processing mode" to Enabled with Mode as "Merge"
  4. Navigate to Computer Config/Policies/Admin Templates/Windows Components/Remote Desktop Services/Remote Desktop Session Host/Remote Session Environment
  5. Set "Always show desktop on connection" to Enabled
  6. Set "Enforce Removal of Remote Desktop Wallpaper" to Disabled
  7. Navigate to Computer Config/Preferences/Windows Settings/Files
  8. Create a new Update Action that copies our wallpaper from a network share to the local computer, e.g. c:\Users\Public\Pictures\mywallpaper.jpg
  9. Navigate to User Config/Preferences/Windows Settings/Registry
  10. Create an Update action at HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper with a value of c:\Users\Public\Pictures\mywallpaper.jpg
Now just assign the new GPO object to the OU containing your servers, wait for (or force) gpupdate, login and our background will be there.

The key thing to making this work is the loopback processing. Without that, the user parts of the GPO will be ignored when applied to computers in an OU.

Comments

  1. Oh man, you saved my day! I was already about to give up on this. Your solution worked like a charm. Thanks so much!!

    ReplyDelete

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