RDP disconnects when trying to connect to Server 2016

Question

First and foremost, this is regarding a fully patched Windows Server 2016 box from Dell (PowerEdge R540), not Windows Server 2012 R2. I'm going to say this a few times because I keep being told - on other boards - to uninstall the 2012R2 Windows Updates which caused the problem in 2012R2 or to install the hotfixes which are only for 2012R2.

So... This is a Windows Server 2016 box :)

RDP works great to this Windows Server 2016 server up until the point it doesn't. When it stops working we get the error 4005 - "The Windows logon process has unexpectedly terminated." In the Remote Desktop Services section of EventVwr we see 36 - "An error occurred when transitioning from CsrConnected in response to EvCsrInitialized. (Error Code 0x80070102)." The user sees a black screen for a few seconds and then gets disconnected.

The issue first started appearing a few weeks ago - 9/16/20 - but not immediately after anything was installed. The previous Windows Updates which had been installed were a few weeks prior in late August.

Rebooting the server fixes the issue for 48ish hours before the issue pops back up and you have to reboot again.

Oh, and the only thing this box does is run SQL. That's it. There's nothing else installed.

Again, the issues are the same as on Windows Server 2012R2 but this is a Windows Server 2016 box. (I know this is overkill but I need something to work with for Server 2016, not 2012R2) :)

So my question is how do you fix this issue on a Windows Server 2016 box?

Answer 1

This ended up being a bit of an oddball.

The server is connected to a SAN which had a corrupt MFT causing iSCSIPRT to constantly (I mean almost every second) terminate and reconnect to the session. Once this issue was fixed - chkdsk /F - the volume came back up and we (myself and a MS engineer) are guessing the network became stable enough to hold an RDP session.