You connect to the office PC from home — and the colleague sitting at that PC is signed out mid-work. Nothing crashed. This is the Windows session model working exactly as designed, and understanding it explains half of all Remote Desktop confusion.
Every 'Remote Desktop kicked me out' complaint starts with the same surprise. The behaviour feels like a bug or a wrong setting, but it follows from one design fact: a client Windows PC has exactly one interactive session. This page explains what a session is, what the person at the PC sees, and the two exceptions that make the behaviour look inconsistent until you know the rules.
The handover sequence on a Windows 10/11 PC. There is one session slot, so a new login has to take it over.
A session is one person's working environment: their desktop, their open apps, their documents. Windows itself runs background services in a separate non-interactive session, and then offers exactly one interactive session on a client version of Windows. The keyboard-and-monitor login (the console session) and a Remote Desktop login are two doors into that same single room — they are not two rooms.
This is the same licence limit described in the main guide: client Windows is licensed and built for one person working at a time. Windows Server is the product built with many session slots.
When you connect with a different account, the person at the PC gets a message saying another user is trying to log in and that they will be logged off. If they do nothing, Windows signs them out after roughly 30 seconds and your desktop appears on your screen. Meanwhile the PC's own monitor drops to the sign-in screen.
This is why the first rule of sharing an office PC is coordination, not software: agree who uses the machine, and when.
Connect with the same account that is already logged in, and the story changes completely. Windows recognises the session as yours and simply reconnects you to it: same apps, same half-typed document, nothing closed. The screen at the PC locks, so nobody in the office can watch or interfere with your desktop while you work remotely.
This reconnect behaviour is genuinely useful — start work at the office PC, disconnect, reconnect from home and carry on — and the companion page on session reconnect covers it in full.
Two buttons that look alike do very different things:
You can see live sessions and their states in Task Manager, Users tab on the PC. From a command prompt, quser lists who has a session and whether it is active or disconnected — a legitimate built-in command that helps before you take over a shared machine.
Once the model is clear, the working rules write themselves:
See the video walkthrough — user IDs created on one PC, the sign-out problem appearing live, and the routes the video discusses.
▶️ Watch Full VideoThere is no supported setting on Windows 10/11 that lets a local and a remote user work at the same time. You can avoid surprise sign-outs by coordinating timings and by each person using their own account, but the one-session limit itself can only be lifted by moving to Windows Server with RDS.
Sign-out closes them, just like signing out yourself, and unsaved changes can be lost. That is different from a disconnected session, where everything keeps running and waits for you to reconnect.
No. Windows Server is built for many simultaneous sessions, so a new login simply gets its own session. Two free administrative sessions are included for managing the server, and regular multi-user work is licensed with RDS CALs.