There was a post discussing VNC hanging when connecting to OS X a few months back, but it was OS X 10.4, so I thought I'd see if someone has experience with our problem.
We're trying to remotely connect to a Mac mini from Vista machines. The Mac is running Snow Leopard. We're doing this over the LAN – we don't want to go out over the Internet and back in – so we're using VNC.
We can connect OK, but, after about 5 mins, the connection drops and we're left with a static image of the screen prior to the connection having dropped. The VNC client appears to be active (e.g. screen repaints when you move windows on top of it, etc). Close the client and restarting it allows us to reconnect. However, five minutes later we're "frozen" again.
We've disabled sleep and switched off the screen saver.
We've tried UltraVNC and TightVNC – both have the same issue. I've read some similar comments about RealVNC (using Leopard/XP).
Does anyone know a way to fix this? We'd rather not have to use KVMs, and solutions like LogMeIn, even if they'd work better, seem to need to go via the Internet – which is not an option for us.
UPDATE
Seems like it's only that the screen is not getting updated. If we connect it to a physical monitor then the mouse/keyboard actions are still being performed.
Best Answer
We had this problem with our Mac Mini which we have for support. The solution we found was to use Vine Server which is a free download, and supports Snow Leopard. There is a "System Server" option which allows it to run on startup, and when combined with UltraVNC on our Windows computers it seems to have been stable enough for general use. Although it seems to work alongside the Apple VNC server, you should turn that off to ensure no confusion.