Pulse Secure, Parallels, and the Windows Ctrl Key

January 18, 2021 at 6 AM

I just moved from a Windows 7 virtual machine to Windows 10 at work, but, as soon as I moved over to the new VM, the Control key stopped registering in Pulse Secure remote desktop sessions. I’m working in RStudio, so Ctrl+Enter and Ctrl+Shift+Enter are massively important key commands.

After a lot of searching around, I found that this is a Parallels issue, not a Windows 10 or Pulse Secure bug. For one reason or another, instructing Parallels to optimize its keyboard handling for games fixes the issue. (See this forum post and KB article.)

Maybe this post will save someone else an hour of Googling.