EDIT: It turns out that this was a mistake – I had long ago acquired the habit of stopping the rdpclip.exe process on any Windows client that I was using rdesktop to work on whenever copy/paste stopped working and re-connect to solve the problem. I had done this at the same time where I changed the connection settings which made it appear to solve the problem. The real answer when copy/paste stops working through rdesktop is to kill the rdpclip.exe process and disconnect/reconnect.
I recently was upgraded to a Windows 7 desktop for Windows usage at work. I quickly noted that I was not able to copy and paste from my Linux desktop to my rdesktop session that I was running to interact with Windows 7 which makes life much harder to work with.
After some research and comparison against Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 R2, and Windows Server 2008 R2, it appeared to be isolated to Windows 7 alone so I called on one of my Windows Sysadmin buddies for help.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any Windows arcane knowledge after this experience but he quickly found that the flag I needed to pass to rdesktop was the -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD flag to allow clipboard redirection through rdesktop. This is currently an un-documented feature in rdesktop.
This is undocumented because it’s not in the man page. I realize that many folks are moving away from man pages of late but there is no excuse for incomplete man pages if there is one at all.
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