In a pure Windows based Terminal Server Environment I am looking for ways to force the termination of an application after session logout/timeout.
With Citrix services I could use HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Citrix\wfshell\TWI to list all applications that should be terminated immediatly. But without Citrix I do not know if this is possible at all. I hope there is another registry entry for this purpose?
Background info: some misbehaving drivers are causing that the sessions will stay open after logout for longer periods of time. If we could register the apps that can be terminated safely the cleanup process will free the resources for the sessions much quicker. In our Citrix Environment this had tremendous impact thus we are looking for a solution for our pure Windows Environment too.
Thanks!
Best Answer
You might be able to fix this by setting the AutoEndTasks registry value to "1" (REG_SZ).
The default is "0":
You can tweak the timeouts by configuring the following registry values:
As @Frankenstein points out, AutoEndTasks could potentially terminate programs, not saving changes to open documents, two points are worth taking into account:
From an administrative standpoint, I think AutoEndTasks is necessary. If you want to buy users more time, you can configure the WaitToKillAppTimeout registry value.