Kill Remote Session using QWINSTA and RWINSTA

If you need to terminal service to a remote windows server, but cant because no sessions are available, you can use QWINSTA and RWINSTA to query then kill offending sessions so then you can get to the server.


First, use QWINSTA to query the sessions:
From a command prompt enter:
qwinsta /server:servername
Example:

In the above example I have shown “nameofserver” instead of the actual server name.
Note the ID of the session that you want to kill. In this case, we will kill session ID 2 (pdouglas)

To kill the session, use RWINSTA:
From the command prompt enter:
rwinsta ID /server:servername
Example: