WorkAround: Console2 + Telnet.exe on Windows 7 Crashes ConHost.exe

Entering the Windows telnet.exe prompt mode causes the shell process underneath Console2 to crash on Windows 7. You can reproduce this by just invoking telnet with no arguments in a Console2 session. An alternate route to hit this is exiting a telnet session with CTRL+].

The symptom is Console2 freezing because it is no longer getting text from its slaved native console followed up with a crash dialog for conhost.exe and whetever your shell was.

Unhandled exception at 0xffdd1df9 in conhost.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0000000003385460.>    conhost.exe!SB_StreamWriteToScreenBuffer()  + 0x61 bytes   

A workaround is to launch telnet into a separate conhost.exe window.

#force telnet.exe to start in its own console window. 
function telnet { start $env:SystemRoot\System32\telnet.exe $args }

Or use putty –P port –telnet host as an alternative to telnet.exe. (I can’t get plink.exe to be interactive with telnet for me.)

Update

Unless you need something nifty that telnet.exe is doing, a more elegant solution is to Lee Holmes’ Connect-Computer.ps1 PowerShell script as a telnet replacement.