Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello everyone,

I’m using Power Automate Desktop on a VM, and I’ve noticed an issue with actions that rely on image recognition, such as clicking an image or using image as a reference.

The flow works correctly while I am connected to the VM session. However, if I disconnect from the VM but keep the session open through a .bat script, the image-based actions stop working.

Has anyone faced this behavior before?

What I’m trying to understand is:

Whether image-based actions require an active interactive session.
If disconnecting from the VM affects screen rendering or UI accessibility for these actions.
Whether there is a recommended way to keep the session usable for PAD image actions while not being actively connected via RDP.
If this is expected behavior, what is the best workaround?

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thank you!

I have never tried to do that so I don't have first hand experience. So I don't know if the But I would assume that almost certainly image-based actions will stop working since they are very fragile actions. If even just one pixel is different in the session vs your captured image then the action will not find the image. So most likely something changed visually in the GUI when you disconnected from the machine. So maybe the resolution or scaling changed when you disconnected and that's why it broke.

In general you should expect the flows to fail or at least give weird unstable behavior if you disconnect from VM while having attended flow run running. You should buy unattended license if you want the flows to work properly without having to be logged in to the machine yourself.