Keyboard and mouse stop working over VPN on iMac but not MacBook

Question

I have a 2008 iMac 24 and an old white MacBook. I connect to work using a VPN.

Using Microsoft Remote Desktop on the iMac 24, the mouse and keyboard stop responding and I have to kill the remote session - sometimes after a few minutes, more often after a few seconds. I can still see activity remotely after the mouse and keyboard fail, so I know it's not the connection.

On my MacBook, though, the mouse and keyboard work for a whole session and I've never seen them fail.

This is a pain, as I would obviously like to use the big iMac screen to work remotely than the small MacBook one!

I'm at a loss how to troubleshoot this, though. I've tried different remote clients - the old Microsoft Remote Desktop, the new one from the Mac App Store, and CoRD - and they all have the same behaviour on both systems. I've measures the ping time from the iMac to my workstation at work, and sometimes it's way up there at ~300ms but most often it's around 16ms, but apart from lag it doesn't seem to make a difference (I'm connected on the MacBook right now, and the ping time is 300-400ms, so the connection is very laggy, but the keyboard and mouse still work.)

I tried today running Microsoft Remote Desktop on the iMac with 'Thousands' of colours rather than the default of 'Millions' and in a window of size 1024x768 - but the mouse and keyboard still stopped responding remotely.

The MacBook is running OXS Lion and has Intel GMA graphics, and the iMac is running Mavericks and has an ATI Radeon 2600 with 256MB of RAM, using a Bluetooth Magic Mouse and a wired USB keyboard.

My remote workstation is running Windows 7 Ultimate with a Nvidia Quadro 410. When I'm working, I'm generally using Visual Studio 2013 with a dark theme, with hardware acceleration enabled (though of course not operating remotely).

All suggestions welcome, I'll try anything! Much as I love my old MacBook, doing serious development on it's itty bitty screen is very frustrating. I want to be able to work from home but still be productive and not spend 20% of my time moving windows about..

Answer 1

I created a new User Account on the iMac and now it works reliably.