Remote Desktop connection without domain name

Use the computername of the remote system, e.g., CLOUDHOSTEDVM\Administrator. When you use .\ (or no prefix) via RDP, it assumes the domain/computer name of your connection, not the target computer.

imaging you want to remote desktop from A to B as user 'someone' on the B machine. you could do:

user: \someone

or

user: B_MACHINE_NAME\someone

if you want to login as user 'someone' from machine A.

user: .\someone

In case anyone runs into this again, I was having the same problem logging into a machine with the same user name I use on the local machine, but a different domain. My computer would always drop the machinename\ or .\ from the username even when it was saved in the RDP file since the user name matched what I was currently logged in with. The solution I found was to combine the two like machinename\.\username (I edited the RDP file with notepad - I'm not sure if the user interface would take it). With that, remote desktop now shows .\username when I load up the RDP file and forces the username from the remote system.

This ancient problem remains in Windows 10 till the day of writing (September 2022). The built in RDP client was working all right till a few weeks back, but probably after an update, it started prefixing users with the target computer name; so login fails with "authentication error (Code: 0x800706be)".

The solution that worked for me: I downloaded the Microsoft Remote Desktop app from Microsoft Store:

https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9WZDNCRFJ3PS

This client works without any issues.

With windows 10 use \\Administrator