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I use remote desktop quite a bit and I spent some time today playing with a lot of combinations of settings to get the best performance. I found a couple interesting things so maybe it will help someone else out
1. Performance is significantly better when I enable both Desktop Composition and Visual Styles. This really took me by surprise, but here's where it's most evident.
With these settings disabled, if I remotely login and start Google Chrome as a fullscreen window, I can see multiple screen repaints. Each repaint starts from the top left corner of the screen and goes down to the bottom right. I can watch the repaint go from left to right as it's going down. The same is true if try to load a webpage. As things load up on the webpage, it triggers an additional screen refresh.
On the other hand, if I enable both of these settings there is only 1 repaint when I start Chrome. Not only that, it seems to happen in big square blocks rather than line by line. This is also the case when I load a webpage.
2. Performance is slightly better when I have my local and remote desktop color depth to match each other (32bit color). I thought if I reduced the session color depth to something lower like 15-bit, it'd be faster but that wasn't the case.
Edit:
My local and remote machines both run Windows 7
