Terrible Icons in High Resolution Mode in RDP/MSTSC

I’ve learned one thing from Twittering, and that’s just say whatever comes to mind. Hence I’ve started writing these little one-off posts. Yet another inane thing that I’ve come across in my day to day work is that I hate working in non-native resolutions when connected to my VM’s via RDP/MSTSC. I have a feeling that the Virtual Server client tool is probably more efficient but it usually doesn’t support scaling to your monitors actual resolution. Using RDP/MSTSC you can specify the resolution you want to scale to, making life much better when trying to code on a virtual machine. So you’re no longer restrained to the wonky resolutions native to the virtual graphics adapter. The only limitation you still have is the color depth options, when you go over 1152xwhatever it no longer supports the 32-bit depth, and drops down to 16-bits. Which isn’t too bad for coding but the icons look like crap. Never fear, someone else was irritated by this long time gone and found a pretty decent solution, that yet again requires mucking about in the registry.

Then reboot, not perfect but it’s a lot better than looking at 32-bit icons in 16-bit mode.

Again, as always cite your resources, Annoyances.org this is where I got the icon bit-depth setting and this is where I got the mask registry.