window got stuck

Hyper-v guest session got stuck on the above screen when returning from saved state and I had to turn off and reboot the virtual machine. It’s very annoying because the problem rendered saved state useless. It also happened when I simply close a working hyper-v session window and open it again or when the host system is rebooted (because of Windows automatic update)

When I tried to figure out any solution or alternative, I figured Remote desktop connection suffered the same problem.

Windows 10 version 1903

Windows 10 version 1809 was working totally fine. This problem started showing up ever since the OS was updated to version 1903.

Apparently, when you close the window of the hyper-v session or remote desktop connection, you will notice the CPU of the VM shoot up to 100% and stay at 100%, effectively render the VM unresponsive.

Temporarily fix

A quick fix is to assign 3 cpu cores to the virtual machine. But I don’t like to assign more resources than the virtual machine is needed, just for the sake of a problem in version 1903.

A better temporarily fix is to disable WDDM graphics display driver:

  • Step 1: run gpedit.msc (Local group policy)
  • Step 2: go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Remote Session Environment > Using WDDM graphics display driver for Remote Desktop Connections
group editor
  • Step 3: double click to bring up the config window
  • Step 4: select Disabled
  • Step 5: click Apply
disable WDDM
  • Step 6: reboot the machine

Once the machine is back up running, the freezing problem should go away! Hopefully, Microsoft will have a fix soon to take care of this problem.

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