How to capture a screenshot when not actually logged into the machine during running Selenium tests with Jenkins on Windows?

We have a CI environment with Jenkins running a test suite of Selenium Tests in a Windows (XP and/or Windows 7) VM. If I am not physically logged into the VM running these tests via RDP, all I see are black (blank) PNGs. I've tried all of the 'capture' methods available (both Base 64 encoded and file based) for multiple Selenium RC 2ish releases (e.g 2.0b2, 2.0rc3, 2.0.0, 2.1.0) and I get the same results for everything I've tried. Is anyone else running Selenium in a Windows CI deployment and able to capture screens? Or 开发者_Go百科better stated, can anyone shed light on how I can capture screens in Windows, using the Selenium API without having to be physically on the box"?

If you are not logged onto the box, or you either closed or minimized the RDP connection, there is no desktop, and screen captures will be blank.

What you need to do is use a VNC server/viewer, so that the machine/vm in question has a visible desktop session.

We are also doing something very similar. We have a windows VM setup which is running Hudson and Selenium Grid.
When our test cases fail we capture a screenshot of the browser so we get more detail of why a test case failed.
We are using the #captureEntirePageScreenshotToString method

We're doing it, and it works for us. We're using JetBrains' TeamCity instead of Jenkins, running on Windows Server 2003. We run the Selenium RC server as a Windows service, using the Java Service Launcher.