Live Mesh is a fantastic product, on top of giving access and synchronisation services to 5GB of storage on SkyDrive, it provides the ability to open remote desktop connections to machines over the internet.  It is this connectivity gain which I have made most use of in the past, and unfortunately it has caused me no end of pain after a complete rebuild of my laptop, so much so I’ve had to disable remote connections.

About a month ago I rebuilt my laptop OS, something I do fairly regularly (well at least once a year) to make sure everything is running smoothly.  I have a Dell Latitude D820 (Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM and NVIDIA Quadro VS120M Display Adapter) and it has served me very well for more than 4 years.  However I noticed an issue recently with my laptop after rebuild whereby upon boot all I got after logging in was a black screen with a white mouse pointer!  I tried everything I could as this seemed to be quite a common occurrence when I’d searched for it, at first I thought it was a graphics driver issue so I uninstalled went back to basics and tried with each version of the drivers, still the same outcome. 

I was however able to remote desktop using Live Mesh to my machine and see the full desktop and interact fully, so it continued to baffle me. Well I had to flatten my hard drive for an unconnected reason.  So as I started to rebuild once again I tested each stage to check where the black screen issue appeared.  I noticed it happened after I installed Live Mesh and enabled remote connections, something I’ve done many times before but having been able to replicate the issue twice I believe there is another issue, maybe it is a combination of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit SP1 and Live Mesh I’m not sure.  All I know is since I have disabled remote connections through Live Mesh the issue doesn’t exist on my laptop anymore.

So my final question is: has anyone else seen the same behaviour?  Have you had problems after enabling remote connections?  I’d like to hear from anyone else having this issue.  I’m trying to raise a bug on the relevant Connect element but have been unable to so far, I’ll update this post with the link when I have created it.