2. Forget to disconnect the remote desktop session when leaving home to go to the office.
3. Arrive at the office, and notice that your desktop seems a little laggy/sluggish. Normal windows just don't seem quite as smooth as they should be, and VirtualBox VMs have become laggy enough to be *really* annoying.
4. Spend the next 10 minutes trying to figure out what's broken. Plenty of free RAM... CPU load below 20%... disk not thrashing... WTF?!??
5. Just as you're about to give up and try a reboot, finally notice the little Remote Desktop icon on the taskbar.
D'oh!
I suspect that VMs were much more severely affected because the VM's entire display is probably treated as a raw bitmap that has to be updated across the RD connection, whereas updating of native (non-VM) windows is probably easier to optimize (e.g. forward the higher-level X-Windows primitives or something).
