Remotely disconnecting a Terminal Services Session

I tried to logon to one of my clients servers this morning and once I’d entered the user name and password I just got a blank screen.

I tried connecting to the console session and had similar luck. I’ve seen this one or two times before and normally a reboot sorts it out and I put it down to Terminal Services getting itself or confused

But I didn’t want to restart the server during the day as I’d have all the hassle of getting everyone to stop what they were doing and this particular site has lots of remote users

You can’t restart the terminal services service so what was I supposed to do?

I found this blog post,

Ingo Rammer’s Weblog : Remotely disconnecting a Terminal Services Session

I used

QWINSTA /Server: name/IP

to list the sessions

Once I’d identified the session I wanted to boot I used

RWINSTA sessionid /SERVER: name/IP

To remove the session

I was then able to log back into the server!