Windows 2012 R2 start button not working over RDP

Why not disable shutdown the Shutdown button and use a shortcut on your desktop or quicklaunch bar to restart?

Right-click on your desktop and select New> Shortcut

In the Type the location of the item: textbox enter %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -r

The -r parameter is used to restart the computer.

The following two parameters can be used with -r: -f Forces running applications to close without warning. -t xx Set timeout for restart to xx seconds.

The following command would reboot the computer instantly. %windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -r -f -t 00

Click the Next > button and Name your shortcut.

Hope this helps.

If you are getting errors trying to resolve the DNS name and the WINS server is not returning proper responses (which what the SMB_NETLOGON packets are), this means that your Win7 machine will not be able to discover a domain controller to talk to. This is inline with the error message you are getting.

To help you troubleshoot those types of errors, enable Netlogon logging by running "nltest /dbflag:2000ffff" and after reproducing the problem look at %windir%\debug\netlogon.log. You will see the machine trying to locate a domain controller and what the errors it is getting are. Once you fix those, it should work fine.

Since you mentioned that the WINS server is supplied by the university, is it actually reachable from the VM? Likely you can't do NetBIOS name resolution because your WINS server is unreachable and your DNS configuration is busted (the error in step 2).