Can you hear me now? ... No

I've spent the last three days trying to figure out how we lost audio in our server products.

I had the following pieces of information:

1. We are using DirectSound.
2. The following DirectSound call threw the exception: ApplicationException. Of course…it's not documented for this constructor.

_captureBuffer = new CaptureBuffer(desc, device);

3. The following DirectSound call did not threw an exception, however VS2005 Watch window says that the Caps property threw a NullReferenceException. So basically I have an empty Caps property.

_captureDevice = new Capture();

4. I ran the DirectSound managed sample CaptureSound and that application had the same problems as I was having in my server application.

This all makes me start wondering about drivers and hardware…but the weird thing was the problem manifested at the same time on three servers.

While attempting to debug this problem I was using Microsoft's Remote Desktop to access the servers. It actually turns out that Remote Desktop is the problem.

To fix the problem:

1. Open Remote Desktop Connection. Enter the machine address and then select Options.
2. Select the Local Resources page and in the Remote computer sound group box select Leave at remote computer.
3. Select Connect.
4. Log in to your machine
5. Close the Remote Desktop session.

Can you hear me now? …Yes