RemoteApp name on Taskbar not updating

Question

I'm using a RemoteApp connection from Windows 7, to a Windows Server 2012 machine. Very often the application name on the taskbar will not update, when the actual program window title area changes. I found this Microsoft article that details this apparently known issue:

Symptoms

When working with a Terminal Server RemoteApp connection, the name of the application in the taskbar does not appear as expected. For Example, when connected to the application Product Studio, the name listed in the taskbar appears as (Remote):

Your expected result would be that when connected to the application Product Studio, the name listed in the taskbar appears as Application Name (Remote).

Cause

This issue occurs because the local taskbar does not receive the EVENT_OBJECT_NAMECHANGE event from the system due to a timing issue. The EVENT_OBJECT_NAMECHANGE is needed to update the taskbar title information.

Resolution

Note: The issue does not affect how the application works. You can safely ignore this issue. To work around this issue, the taskbar can be refreshed by closing and then re-starting the application.

The proposed resolution above of closing and restarting the app is obviously not ideal, and anyways doesn't seem to work. Is there any way to "force" the taskbar to update, via an AHK script perhaps? Or any other possible workaround for this?

Answer 1

Probably the simplest way of doing that that isn't really intrusive is going through the remote secure desktop (press Ctrl+Alt+End, then Esc to back out of it again - which I believe should be possible to automate with AHK - though you need keyboard focus on a RemoteApp window for it to work).

This will force the server side of RemoteApp to re-enumerate the windows, during which it will pick up the updated window title.

An alternative method I'll mention for completeness - it's probably more trouble than it's worth - is to restart rdpshell.exe from inside the remote session.