Card swiper input via RDP is different in full-screen mode

Question

I have just come across a truly bizarre problem. My company has USB-based card swipers for reading credit cards. Swipe a card, and it reads it as keyboard input. Nice and simple. We can open Notepad and swipe a card, and get data that looks like:

%B6034********9062^LYNK GIFT CARD^1812120000****1000?;6034********9062=1812120000****1?

(with actual numbers for the *'s, and this is a random gift card I have laying around, but the principle's true for credit cards too)

Our users use Windows Remote Desktop to get to the server where the software that charges the card lives. When the RD window is not full screen, everything works as expected. But when it is maximized, this is the input that shows up when that card is swiped :

5b6034********90626lynk gift card61812120000****1000/;6034********9062=1812120000****1/

All capitals became lower case, %'s became 5's, and so on. Basically, everything is losing the shift key.

This only happens when swiping into a maximized remote desktop window. If it's not maximized, or if it's maximized but you're swiping into a local app, then it behaves normally. Regular keyboard input works normally, however.

Answer 1

As I was writing the question, I realized that it was the shift key not being picked up (as I mentioned above), and searching for that led me to find this which explained how to fix it.

After some experimenting, I found that changing asetting in the nested (Microsoft OS based) Remote Desktop Connection client cured this. The setting is on the “Local Resource” under the “Keyboard” section and is called “Apply Windows key combinations (for example ALT+TAB)”. This needs to be changed from the default (In full screen mode only) to “On the local computer” (don’t forget to save the connection settings).