Remote desktop client (mstsc) crashes on invalid keystroke in remote environment

Question

I'm experiencing a really strange issue where MSTSC crashes whenever I enter an invalid keystroke in the remote OS or whenever an error/warning dialog is displayed. For example,

• Backspacing in a CMD window when there are no more characters left to remove
• Typing in Windows Explorer to find a folder by keystroke and there are no matches.
• Renaming a file and changing the file extension (a warning message is displayed).

RDP Host: Windows 8.1 Enterprise N x64 (Azure VM Standard Image) Version 6.3 (Build 9600)

RDP Client: Windows 10 Pro x64 Version 1511 (OS Build 10586.218)

Issue does not occur when using RDP client on Mac OS.

Answer 1

This can be resolved by disabling local audio through MSTSC settings window. This would be related to an audio issue - the correlation with the examples in the question being that they all generate a windows sound effect. Whenever the host machine plays any sound, the RDP client seems to crash. While this is likely to resolve the issue - unsure what the root cause would be.