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Can I run Unattended Flows on Windows 10 Education?

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Posted on by rjhale

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I'm evaluating the RPA licenses, and I recently added a trial license to my account. On a test machine running Windows 10 Education, I setup Power Automate desktop and configured the machine runtime. I'm able to kick of Desktop Flows from the service, and those have been running successfully. When I switch the mode to unattended, sign out of the test computer, and trigger the Flow to run from the service, I always get an error stating "Error returned: "Cannot create new session to execute unattended run."

Here are some of the things I've tried:

Tried both direct machine connections and using our enterprise gateway
made sure that the connection established in the service is the same account I'm signed in with on the test computer
I've tried changing the default account that the service runs with to the same account I'm signing into the computer with
Made sure the account I'm testing with has Log on as a Service and Remote Desktop Access

I'm running out of ideas, and I'm starting to think that these won't run in unattended mode either because of my trial license (which wouldn't make much sense) or that we simply can't run unattended desktop flows on Windows 10 Education.

Any other thoughts on what may be causing this error?

Thanks.

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Power Automate Desktop

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rjhale 212 on at

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Circling back to my own post. I figured this out after a lot of trial and error with our group policy settings. The setting "Always prompt for password upon connection" under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Security was set to enabled in one of the latest Windows Security Baselines. We have another group policy object that gets applied after the security baseline, and we changed the setting to disabled. Once the policy was pushed down to the machine, unattended PAD Flows started working right away.

I hope this is useful information for anyone else who may be operating in a highly managed environment such as ours. I did not find this information in any Microsoft documentation which I find a little discouraging given the security baselines that are used by most large institutions are published by Microsoft.

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befa 23 on at

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I have a similar issue, with the following error on the desktop flow action:

"body": {
"error": {
"code": "MSEntraMachineAlwaysPromptingForPassword",
"message": "Could not create unattended session with these credentials. Please make sure the machine is not always prompting for credentials upon connection if you’re using Microsoft Entra ID credentials."
}
}

There is this this official support page which suggests the same remedy as rjhale found, namely setting 'Always prompt for password upon connection' to false.
Desktop flow failing with AADMachineAlwaysPromptingForPassword error code. - Microsoft Support

The registry key is Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services; check if the Terminal Services key has a value fPromptForPassword set to 1.

They suggest a further troubleshooting step:

If "Always prompt for password upon connection" is not enabled yet you are still experiencing the error, then use regedit to open the following registry key: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp. Then look for the DWORD fPromptForPassword and set it to 0; if that DWORD does not exist you can create it.

I found this article by searching by the setting name + Power Automate desktop unattended.
I did not find the article by the error code or the message, because the article seems to use an older error code 'AADMachineAlwaysPromptingForPassword', with AAD instead of Entra. It also doesn't include the message written out, part of it is shown in an image.
I hope this makes someone's day better by shortening the time required to solve this issue.

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