I decided to be an early adopter of an OS for once and upgraded to Windows 10 the weekend after it released. It’s not completely awful but it’s also not without it’s headaches. One thing I wanted to post and share was this little bit of info since there doesn’t seem to be anything on the internet about it. After upgrading RDP stopped working and reason why is because of a really awful automatic decision the OS is making for you.

After the upgrade and I connected to my home network again (“for the first time”) it asked if I wanted to allow discovery of other items on the network. I said no. Well, apparently when you say no it automatically sets the category for that network connection to public and Windows won’t allow RDP connections if it’s on a public network. Why it automatically assumes this based on discovery is beyond me. It’s a really dumb move on Microsoft’s part. They should ask you how you want to classify like it did in Windows 7 and 8.

To fix it you have two options:
Manually edit the registry settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Profiles\{Whatever GUID you have} and change Category to “1” and Category Type to 0 (that’s what mine currently are and it’s working again.

Or, you can remove the connection (I deleted the GUID key mentioned in the location above) and let it prompt you again. You may have to disable/enable the network adapter before it will do this. You have to tell it to allow discovery when it asks about the network again and it will set it to a Private network.