Judging from a quick google, this problem is very common and lots of people have strugged with it, without a solution that I have found.
Basically, let's say you access a remote PC (1600x1200 monitor) from a laptop which is 1024x768.
As soon as the connection is established, the desktop of the PC will get resized to 1024x768 as well.
This obviously screws up the icon layout on that PC - if you had any icons placed outside the 1024x768 area.
There is a complicated hack one can do on the laptop's RDP config file, involving
screen mode id:i:1
desktopwidth:i:1600
desktopheight:i:1200
.....
smart sizing:i:1
but this then prevents any user accessible settings on the RDP client... so the solution is to use the /edit command line parameter on the client, but this switches the first line above to
screen mode id:i:2
which takes you back to square one.
The above settings deliver a partial solution: the full 1600x1200 desktop is scaled down on the laptop to 1024x768, which is fine because you see the entire remote desktop, but obviously the text in any apps is barely readable, and there is no way to "zoom in". This is equivalent to PC/A option 2) below.
There seems to be no way to achieve the PC/Anywhere functionality, whereby you have two options on the laptop (client):
1) 1:1 pixel transfer (and the 1024x768 laptop is then just a window onto the remote 1600x1200 PC, and you get scroll bars so you can move about the
entire remote desktop)
2) "Screen Scaling" which reduces the entire remote desktop to the local PC/A window (this obviously also produces mostly unreadable text, but it allows you to open and close apps, resize them, etc)
On the PC/A client one can switch between the above two modes anytime.
Has anybody ever solved what appears to be a really obvious crippling of the RDP functionality?
As to why I don't just use PC/A, well I do and have been for years, and it has very slick file transfer features, and it never messes up the remote desktop, but PC/A is, like most software written or taken over by Symantec, a load of crap, and every so often (usually when I am 1000nm away) the remote end decides that it has an open session, or crashes, and won't accept any calls. I suppose I could open up an RDP session and reboot the remote PC
I would like to move over to RDP because it is noticeably more data-efficient than PC/A, which is relevant on a GPRS or 3G connection. But there seems to be no way to achieve a readable result (basically, a 1:1 or similar pixel mapping) and at the same time be able to reach over the whole remote desktop (using scroll bars or whatever). RDP doesn't seem to ever display scroll bars representing the remote desktop.
I suppose one could use a laptop with a higher-res screen than any remote machine
but that's unrealistic. Possibly, running a virtual desktop on the laptop (i.e. a fake desktop of say 2000 x 1500, which you can zoom around) might work...
I'd appreciate any ideas.