Version history for TightVNC

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Changes for v2.0.3 - v2.0.4

Here is the list of changes in TightVNC 2.0.4, as compared to version 2.0.3. All the changes are in the server part, the viewer is almost the same as in the previous version.
Fixed a potential security problem which could allow a logged in user to gain elevated privilegies in file transfers. This problem affected Windows 2000 systems only.
CPU use was significantly reduced in idle periods when there are no users connected.
Fixed a problem which resulted in wrong color rendering on "big-endian" viewers (e.g. PowerPC-based Mac viewers).
Fixed rendering of semi-transparent mouse cursors. Previously, big black boxes could be seen instead of such cursors.

Changes for v2.0.2 - v2.0.3

Part 1. Changes in TightVNC Server
Fixed a bug which prevented file transfers from working properly under Windows 2000.
Introducing new "error handler" which allows saving memory dumps on critical errors.
In systems with swapped left and right mouse buttons, remote mouse events will be adjusted accordingly. As a result, the remote mouse should work just like the local one.
Fixed a number of problems led to errors on setting service passwords from the installer.
Not allowing to enter administrative passwords longer than eight characters. This limitation is caused by using standard DES-based VNC-compatible authentication. Previous versions used only the first eight characters anyway but it was possible to enter longer passwords and that could confuse users who did not know about the limitation.
Fixed a problem with injecting lowercase characters when CapsLock was on on the server. Previous version generated uppercase characters when CapsLock was on, regardless of the Shift state.
Implemented a special trick to bypass the problem with generating "^6" instead of "6" when using US International keyboard layout. It looks like there is a bug in Windows so we could do nothing better than to cook a workaround specifically for this case.
Fixed clipboard handling with multiple client connections. Previously, clipboard contents might not be sent to particular clients in certain circumstances.
Adjusted log verbosity levels for log messages generated by the control interface connection, so that such messages will not overload the log any more.
Improved support for simple RFB clients that cannot handle desktop size changes.
Made minor adjustments in the user interface. Specifically, the "About..." form has been cleaned up, and a typo has been corrected in the Configuration window.
Part 2. Changes in TightVNC Viewer
Fixed a number of problems with keyboard handling: preventing modifier keys from being stuck on switching to/from the viewer window; distinguishing left and right modifiers properly; sending arbitrary Unicode characters even if they were not defined in the original X11 protocol; and sending correct codes for the keys on the numeric keypad.
Ctrl-Alt-Del combination should not depend on current ScrollLock state (which normally toggles Alt key to Meta key conversion).
Fixed an issue with not sending update requests after choosing Minimize then Maximize on the viewer window (as opposed to the Minimize/Restore sequence which always worked correctly).
Fixed a number of problems with saving and restoring connection options.
Fixed user interface logic in the Options window. There were incorrect dependencies between compression-related controls.
Improved phrasing for a number of error messages and log records in the file transfer module.
Part 3. Changes in the Source Code Distribution
Visual Studio 2010 is now supported, upgraded solution and project files are included in the source distribution. Versions for Visual Studio 2008 are included as well.

Changes for v2.0.1 - v2.0.2

Server for Windows: The server could work incorrectly or even crash when font size adjustment or DPI scaling feature was used. New version should be fully compatible with Windows desktop scaling. This fix was developed for TightVNC 2.0.1 but was not included in that version due to a packaging problem.
Server and Viewer for Windows: More fixes have been made to solve problems with clipboard transfers. Both server and viewer could send question characters instead of non-ASCII symbols if current input language did not match the text encoding. These fixes complement related changes introduced in version 2.0.1.

Changes for v2.0 Beta 3 - v2.0

Introducing new file transfer subsystem based on new protocol extensions. Multiple files and directories can be copied at once, directories are processed recursively. Data compression is used to speed-up copying. Files can be renamed or removed, new directories can be created. File sizes are not limited by 4 Gb any more.
Implemented new server architecture which separates service code from the user interface. This enables service-mode operation under Windows Vista and Windows 7. Also, this fixes all known problems with multi-user features of modern Windows systems like Fast User Switching and Terminal Services.
Screen updates have become reliable. If something went wrong and the picture in the viewer is garbled, incomplete or outdated, it will be recovered in reasonable time. There should be no more hidden menus or destructive window movements. If fast update detection methods fail, full-screen polling will keep updates going.
Featuring new secure administrative interface. What was called "TightVNC tray icon" in previous versions is now a separate process which acts as a control interface to the TightVNC service. Control interface can be optionally protected with a password to make sure users cannot reconfigure or shut down the service unless they know the password (or have administrator privileges).
There should be no more confusion between "default settings" and "user settings". In TightVNC 2.0, there is only one service-mode configuration and it is not affected by any per-user settings. The "Configure..." menu item of the service always shows the effective configuration. From the other side, TightVNC Server can be started as an application, and in that case each user has his/her own configuration.
Featuring IP-based access control for incoming connections. Previous versions of TightVNC did allow similar IP filtering, but now everything is easily configurable. You can even test the rules on specific IP addresses, prior to applying new rules.
TightVNC 2.0 distribution has been packaged with new installer. It's smarter and more efficient. It tries to prevent reboots whenever possible. It invites to set passwords so that TightVNC Server would be ready to work right at the moment of finishing the installation. From the other side, it can operate silently (when run with /S option in the command line). Finally, the complete self-installing TightVNC package (both server and viewer parts, and the uninstall tool) is only 550 kilobytes in size.
Keyboard handling has been improved. Older versions of TightVNC had problems with passing characters that do not fit in the Latin-1 code space. TightVNC 2.0 adds full support for different national codepages and keyboard layouts.
This list of changes is not full. TightVNC Server 2.0 for Windows has been completely rewritten by the TightVNC team. It does not include old TightVNC 1.3 code. So the right answer to the "What's Changed?" question must be "Everything!".

Changes for v2.0 Beta 2 - v2.0 Beta 3

Server and Viewer for Windows: There were many enhancements and fixes related to keyboard handling. Keyboard handling is the primary focus of this Beta version.
Server for Windows: A bug with clipboard handling has been fixed. When running as a service, TightVNC Server could crash if a user copied something to the clipboard.
Server for Windows: There was a bug which caused the control interface to crash if the server had a lot of IP addresses. The problem has been resolved.
Server for Windows: File uploads could fail at changing file modification timestamps. This bug has been fixed.
Server for Windows: Fixed a bug with Web access not enabled by default.
Viewer for Windows: When run with the -help command-line option, the viewer listed a lot of options it actually does not support. This has been fixed. Unsupported options have been removed, supported options have received better documentation.
Viewer for Windows: Unsupported command-line options were treated as host names to connect to. Now the viewer will report error messages on discovering unknown options in the command line.
Viewer for Windows: The viewer used to connect to nowhere if it could not read the specified .vnc file. Now it should exit correctly after showing the error message.
Viewer for Windows: In connection options, the check box "Request shared session" will be disabled after the connection has been established.
There were other minor improvements and fixes.

Changes for v2.0 Beta 1 - v2.0 Beta 2

Part 1. Changes in the Installer
Valid digital signatures have been added to the installer and installed TightVNC executable files. That makes it easy to verify the integrity of the package. Make sure TightVNC has a valid signature of GlavSoft LLC., otherwise it's not the original distribution.
Featuring new option to add exceptions for TightVNC Server and Viewer to Windows Firewall (supported in Windows XP SP2 or any later version of Windows). This makes TightVNC ready to accept connections right on finishing the installation.
Featuring new option to enable system services simulate Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard combination under Windows Vista and above. This allows TightVNC Server handle remote Ctrl-Alt-Del events in all supported operating systems from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 and Windows 2008 Server R2.
The service configuration page (where initial passwords can be set) has become completely optional. And that page will not be auto-selected if the passwords have been set already.
An issue with file sharing failure has been fixed it could be experienced after trying to set both passwords via the service configuration page. Also, there were potential problems with not actually enabling authentication on setting passwords from the installer they have been fixed as well.
There was a number of other minor changes such as user interface enhancements and improvements to the installation logic.
Part 2. Changes in TightVNC Server for Windows
Keyboard handling has been fixed. Previous Beta version could handle combinations like Ctrl-C or Ctrl-V incorrectly it could insert literal C or V instead. New version fixes that it should interpret keyboard modifiers properly. In addition, it fully supports Windows and Menu keys. Finally, sending Ctrl-Alt-Del remotely should work on all supported versions of Windows.
Authentication subsystem has been improved now it would prevent brute-force attacks on passwords by introducing delays after failed authentication attempts. This works for both RFB connections and for administrative passwords. Another authentication-related fix eliminates erroneous authentication requests on reverse connections.
Tight encoder has been fixed it could work incorrectly in previous Beta version. It did not preserve the state of its data stream in situations when it was disabled and then re-enabled by the viewer. As a result, the viewer could not decode compressed data and had to disconnect. Corrected code accurately preserves the state of each encoder to eliminate such protocol synchronization problems.
Clipboard handling has been recovered. Clipboard transfers could fail in either direction due to text format translation problems resolved now.
Mouse position tracking over multiple monitors has been fixed. Previously, coordinates of the mouse cursor could be calculated incorrectly if the primary monitor was not the leftmost and topmost one within a composite desktop.
New version sends viewers descriptive error messages if it must close their connections in the very beginning of the session. For example, if the server does not allow "loopback" connections, the viewer will report that fact. Similarly, the viewer should report other errors like protocol version mismatch or rejects caused by repetitive authentication failures.
Several useful command-line options have been re-implemented: -connect, -disconnectall, -reload and -shutdown (they must be preceded with either -controlservice or -controlapp in the command line). Similar options (with slightly different names) were supported by TightVNC 1.x, but there were no counterparts available in TightVNC 2.0 Beta 1. You requested them, and here they are.
Compatibility with other software has been improved. In particular, palette-based pixel formats are now properly supported. TightVNC Viewer never requests indexed colors, but other RFB-compliant software may do that. Previous version of the TightVNC Server could calculate palette colors incorrectly, effectively converting all colors to black. That issue has been resolved.
In TightVNC file transfer protocol, file modification timestamps are represented in milliseconds. However, previous version erroneously decreased precision and actually operated with pure seconds. That has been fixed.
There was a number of other improvements, including architectural adjustments, additional logging, fixes for real and potential memory leaks, code cleanups, and so on.
Part 3. Changes in TightVNC Viewer for Windows
A bug with registering .vnc file extension has been fixed. The viewer wrote incorrect command line to the registry and then could not restore connections saved in .vnc files.
Keyboard handling has been improved. New version is able to send Windows and Menu keys over the RFB protocol (and new TightVNC Server can handle that correctly).
File modification time format has been corrected in file transfer panels. Timestamps were formatted in UTC for some reason, but now they should show up in local time zone, as we would normally expect that.
"Local cursor shape" setting has been recovered. Now it should take immediate effect on pressing the Ok button in the Connection Options window. In addition, pressing that Ok button would not hide remote cursor that was another bug fixed in this version.
TightVNC Viewer could write repetitive entries to the connection history and it could create meaningless directories in the registry when parsing its command line. Both problems have been fixed.
Note that the above list does not pretend to be complete. Other minor improvements and fixes have been made as well.

Changes for v1.3.10 - v2.0 Beta 1

Introducing new file transfer subsystem based on new protocol extensions. Multiple files and directories can be copied at once, directories are processed recursively. Data compression is used to speed-up copying. Files can be renamed or removed, new directories can be created. File sizes are not limited by 4 Gb any more.
Implemented new server architecture which separates service code from the user interface. This enables service-mode operation under Windows Vista and Windows 7. Also, this fixes all known problems with multi-user features of modern Windows systems like Fast User Switching and Terminal Services.
Screen updates have become reliable. If something went wrong and the picture in the viewer is garbled, incomplete or outdated, it will be recovered in reasonable time. There should be no more hidden menus or destructive window movements. If fast update detection methods fail, full-screen polling will keep updates going.
Featuring new secure administrative interface. What was called "TightVNC tray icon" in previous versions is now a separate process which acts as a control interface to the TightVNC service. Control interface can be optionally protected with a password to make sure users cannot reconfigure or shut down the service unless they know the password (or have administrator privileges).
There should be no more confusion between "default settings" and "user settings". In TightVNC 2.0, there is only one service-mode configuration and it is not affected by any per-user settings. The "Configure..." menu item of the service always shows the effective configuration. From the other side, TightVNC Server can be started as an application, and in that case each user has his/her own configuration.
Featuring IP-based access control for incoming connections. Previous versions of TightVNC did allow similar IP filtering, but now everything is easily configurable. You can even test the rules on specific IP addresses, prior to applying new rules.
TightVNC 2.0 distribution has been packaged with new installer. It's smarter and more efficient. It tries to prevent reboots whenever possible. It invites to set passwords so that TightVNC Server would be ready to work right at the moment of finishing the installation. From the other side, it can operate silently (when run with /S option in the command line). Finally, the complete self-installing TightVNC package (both server and viewer parts, and the uninstall tool) is only 550 kilobytes in size.
This list of changes is not full. TightVNC Server 2.0 for Windows has been completely rewritten by the TightVNC team. It does not include old TightVNC 1.3 code. So the right answer to the "What's New?" question must be "Everything!".

Changes for v1.3.9 - v1.3.10

Windows Server: Impersonating currently logged on user while processing file transfer requests. Disabling file transfers if current user is unknown or nobody is logged in.
Windows Server: Fixed rendering problems when multiple CopyRects were combined with normal updates. That could caused distortions that never updated even with full-screen polling active.
Windows Server: Added new "-silent" command-line option which modifies the behavior of -install, -reinstall and -remove options and makes them not show informational windows on successful execution. Note that -silent should precede other respective options in the command line.
Windows Server: LastRect, XCursor and RichCursor pseudo-encodings were not properly enabled if they preceded true encodings in the SetEncodings protocol message.
Windows Viewer: Fixed integer overflow vulnerabilities reported by Core Security Technologies. A specially modified VNC server could currupt the heap of the connected viewer causing its crash or malfunction.
Windows Viewer: TightVNC Viewer version 1.3.9 saved only successful connections in the list of recently visited VNC servers. Now we save unsuccessful connections too so that users would not ever have to re-type server names after connection failures. Also, several other enhancements were made to the code which handles the list of recent connections.
Windows Viewer: Fixed a bug with not loading passwords from saved .vnc files correctly if the first byte of their encrypted representation was zero.
Windows Viewer: Fixed problems under Windows Vista where Windows taskbar could remain visible above the full-screen window.
Windows Viewer: Fixed a problem with decoding JPEG rectangles wider than 2048 pixels.
Windows Viewer: Fixed a bug with not saving log file name correctly on using the Browse button.
Windows Viewer: Usability improvements in the "New Connection" dialog.
Windows Packaging: Improved installer and uninstall utility. In this version, self-installing executable will not try to install service in Windows Vista. Improved uninstall program always removes the WinVNC service if it was previously installed.
Unix Server: Applied fixes for 64-bit Linux issues, a patch from Russel Miranda.
Unix Server: Made the vncserver script read configuration from files (system-wide /etc/tightvncserver.conf and user-specific $HOME/.vnc/tightvncserver.conf).
All viewers: Allow configuring JPEG quality level regardless of the preferred encoding set. This makes sense because TightVNC Servers can transmit video data as JPEG even if Tight is not the preferred encoding.
Java viewer: Fixed a bug that caused NullPointerException when connecting to any VNC server not supporting TightVNC protocol extensions.
Java viewer: Fixed a bug with ignoreCursorUpdates option in 24-bit color mode caused the viewer to disconnect. Thanks to Damien Mascre for pointing out the issue.
Java viewer: PORT parameter is not required any more, now it defaults to 5900.
Java viewer: Do not defer update requests by default, to minimize delays in screen updates.
Java viewer: Improvements in reporting statistics on disconnect.
Java viewer: Added debugging parameters (DEBUG_XU, DEBUG_CU) that allow using the viewer as a tool for measuring VNC server performance.
Other minor improvements and bugfixes.

Changes for v1.3.8 - v1.3.9

All platforms: Added support for the standard RFB protocol version 3.8 with TightVNC extensions.
All platforms: Made "host:port" parsing maximally compatible with VNC4. Interpreting a number in host names like somehost:5900 as an actual port number if it's not in the range [0..99].
Windows Server: Various user interface enhancements - changes in GUI labels, tray icon with a red border when incoming connections are not possible for any reason, more information in the tray icon tip, smarter logic in displaying the Properties dialog, and more.
Windows Server: Fixed a problem introduced in TightVNC 1.3.8 - default passwords were not respected if user passwords were not set.
Windows Server: Slightly improved handling of passwords. One of the notable changes is that now it's enough to enter a view-only password without providing primary password.
Windows Server: Fixed problems with running WinVNC service and Terminal Services. When a Remote Desktop (RDP) client connected to the console, WinVNC showed black screen and did not restore normal operations even on disconnection of that RDP client. Now, we always share the console correctly, and disable simultaneous RDP and VNC sessions. The changes were ported from VNC 4.1.2.
Windows Server: Better way of simulating Ctrl+Alt+Del. There are reports that this solves the problem with greyed username and password fields on Windows 2003 Server (bug #887617).
Windows Server: Bugfix for the bug #1109102: attempt to restart the machine remotely via TightVNC led to disconnect if there was some non-saved data, and further connections were rejected.
Windows Viewer: Multiple selection now works in file transfers, thanks to developers at Novell and personally Rohit Kumar.
Windows Viewer: The viewer terminated silently when the server dropped connection right after accepting it. Now we report such errors.
Windows version source archive: Included project files for compiling with Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. Also, all required libraries are now included within the source distribution.
Unix Server: Applied patches from Debian Linux that port Xvnc to x86_64 platform (tightvnc-1.2.9-amd64support.p and tightvnc-1.3_alpha7-x86_64.patch), thanks to Quanah Gibson-Mount.
Java viewer: Implemented scaling, either with a fixed scaling factor or automatic. If Java 2D API is available (Java 1.2 and higher), then high-quality scaling is used. From the other side, the viewer remains compatible with Java 1.1 where it would simply use scaling with much decreased image quality. Scaling can be enabled with new "Scaling Factor" parameter but cannot be controlled from the GUI yet.
Java viewer: Added support for ZRLE encoding.
Java viewer: Disabled focus traversal keys under JVMs 1.4 and higher. This fixes the problem with not sending Tab key events to the VNC server.
Java viewer: Fixed wrong pixel format interpretation at decoding RichCursor pseudo-encoding (local cursor could be rendered in wrong colors).
Other improvements and bugfixes, see ChangeLog files within the distribution for more details.