Keeptive turns itself off after firing twice.

[richardberman]

Edited 1/13/2026. Original is below. I'm revising in light of new findings.

This was user error - the "time" was set to 1. Please close.

Earlier versions:

The bug is much simpler. It fires once - always at the max time interval, then does one more, then turns itself off. This is directly on the Win 11 system where Keeptive runs, pinging a remote desktop. I set it up, pick the window, use "mouse move", minimize the target, then start the process. It fires on countdown, and turns itself off. I watched in realtime as it did exactly this.

Setup:

Above is what it looks like immediately after it fires for the first and only time. I have to keep restarting it. I "fixed" this , for my purposes, by using passive mode window activation. This worked:

Above was taken right after it activated the window, where it was self-deactivating before. I then minimized the Keeptive window, expecting it to continue running. It ran only to the next ping, then turned itself off again.

So this is continuing to be a problem. It occurs whether the Keeptive window is minimized or shown, and happens both when minimized to tray, and to taskbar.

ORIGINAL:

Here's the scenario:

On a Win 11 desktop, Keeptive is running, configured to ping a specific window. That window is a remote desktop session. This works fine, except when that Win 11 system is itself remotely accessed. It appears the app either doesn't ping, or perhaps can't find the window. There is no error or other message from the app.

I'm specifically running this to keep that remote desktop from timing out. Call that the "inner" session. I then remote to that system, so we have a second "outer" session. Once that is established, the desktop on the inner session will no longer be pinged by the app.

I haven't yet determined if simply establishing the outer session stops the pinging, as I usually have the outer session (on a completely different computer) minimized, and it might be that.

Note: If I'm operating the outer session - actively using it, instead of it being minimized, the pinging appears to continue, even though I'm not using inner session's window in these cases. When I stop and minimize for a time, the inner session will stop receiving pings.

Trying to be clearer:

System 1: Laptop, Win 11, running a variety of things. This is the "source" system.

System 2: PC, Win 11, remoting into System 1. This is the "inner session". This is the system on which Keeptive runs, pinging the inner-session window. If I want to work on the source system, I do it from system 2.

System 3: PC, Win 11. Remoting into System 2. This is the "outer session". This is done typically to operate other things on system 2 - not the inner remote.

When system 3 is connected, that's when the inner-session window can stop receiving pings, and cause the inner session to time out. But not as long as I'm actively operating System 2 from System 3 (outer session), even though not doing anything with the inner session window. As long as I'm active on System 2, it's fine. When I minimize the remote window running on system 3, but remain connected, after a time, when I go back to system 2, I find it's inner-session window timed out, so it wasn't getting pings.