How to clear RDP Connection History

For every successful connection, the RDP client stores the connection details for the machine that you have connected to. This is often convenient, but if you are on a public machine, it can expose sensitive security details. The RDP client does not give any way to clear the cached connection history.

You can clear the RDP Cache history in a couple of ways:

• Clear the RDP Cache from the registry using regedit
• Use a script to clear the RDP Cache

Clear the RDP Cache from the registry using regedit

1. Open regedit.exe and navigate to:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client
2. There are two registry keys here that need to be cleared:
   • Default – Has the history of the last 10 RDP Connections.
   • Servers – Contains a list of all the Remote Desktop connections that have ever been established from this machine.
3. Expand the Default Key which will contain the most recently used connections. You can delete every entry or select which ones you want to remove:
4. Select the entries that you want to remove, right click and click delete:

   

5. Now expand the Servers key, this contains the details of all the RDP connections that have ever been made from this machine, including the username used to connect:
   
6. There may be many entries, it is easier to delete the entire servers key, then recreate it.
7. Finally, delete the default.rdp file found in your homepath. This is a hidden file and will not show or delete by default. You have to supply an extra switch to the delete command:

   

Clear the RDP Cache using a batch file or command line

A far quicker way to clear the RDP cache is to use the following commands:

reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default" /va /f
reg delete "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Servers" /f
reg add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Servers"
del /ah %homepath%\documents\default.rdp