Fixing Remote Desktop with Microsoft Accounts

19 May 2021

This one’s a short post to document an issue I found with Remote Desktop on Windows 10 20H2.

I was trying to remote in to my laptop which I recently reset and installed a fresh copy of Windows on and kept getting errors saying “The logon attempt failed”, despite trying both the original local account and the MicrosoftAccount domain.

After double-checking the user had permissions to sign in remotely and rebooting a couple of times it turned out that it was related to Windows Hello.

There’s a setting in Settings -> Accounts -> Sign-in options called “Require Windows Hello sign-in for Microsoft account” which blocks logging in with a normal password, even through Remote Desktop sessions. Turn that off, reboot, sign in once locally using the password, and RDP should start working again.

It’s an odd edge case but hopefully this helps anyone who had the same issue!