Remote Desktop MAC and wrong keyboard

Recently I upgraded to the remote desktop app from microsoft that is available in the app store. Previously I was using the 2.1.1 version which worked quite well but felt like changing anyway. Upon switching I noticed that some of my keys were not working as they should, in particular the @ key was coming up with ” and # was ? instead. In fact there were many keys that were not outputting correctly. It turns out that upon making a RDP connection from my MAC to a windows server, the RDP connection was incorrectly identifying my remote keyboard.

There are 2 ways to fix this problem I found. The first way requires you to change the keyboard layout in the languages bar. For whatever reason RDP thinks I am running a french canadian keyboard on my MAC even though it is just a standard US layout. So whenever I log into a computer via RDP (in particular an AWS windows instances), I have to switch to US from Canada. This is most definitely a bug since no where is the Canadian language/keyboard actually installed as you can see from the following screen shots.

If you are looking for a more permanent solution you have to crack open the systems registry and make a manual edit.

Log into the server you want to ‘fix’ and run regedit.

Open the following registry entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout

Right click on Keyboard Layout, select new and add DWORD (32 bit) Value. Call this value IgnoreRemoteKeyboardLayout

Double click this new value and set it from 0 to 1.

This will now ignore any potential keyboard change coming from your remote location so you do NOT have to switch the language again.