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More Information about the blinking cursor in Terminal Server 2003

Written on Mar 15 2004 12,105 views, 1 comment


by Brian Madden

Claudio Rodrigues spoke with the developers at Microsoft regarding the lack of blinking cursor support in Terminal Services on Windows Server 2003. Here's what he found (as directly quoted from him):

  1. Some applications go crazy when they see the -1 setting to stop the cursor blinking (as we do on Windows 2000) so they took this out on 2003 and simply ignore the > 0 setting in a TS session and the cursor does not blink.
  2. As you are aware of, the cursor blinking requires timers that consume CPU cycles so there was also a scalability factor on this decision.

They are aware of the issue and it is on their plate but I cannot say for sure if we will see a formal fix/patch for that (I think we will) and they told me they have no idea on a timeframe for this.







Comments

Guest wrote Workaround from Microsoft
on Sun, Dec 12 2004 1:22 PM Link To This Comment
This message was originally posted by Brian Madden on April 22, 2004
Microsoft has provided an undocumented fix that allows you to change the look of the cursor to make it more visable. Add the following registry DWORD value to the Terminal Server: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\Winstations\RDP-Tcp\UserOverride\Control Panel\Desktop\CaretWidth. Set a value here to change the cursor width. I know this is not a "real" fix, but it will have to do for now.

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