Just because you are in a terminal session and you cannot view the desktop doesn't mean that the desktop is not active, just that it is not showing. Original Answer: It did what it does normally - it opened the Notepad process on the user's desktop. I've attached a photo of Process Explorer to help make more sense of it all. Thank you once more to Harry for making me aware of this! We all learn something every day! :D There are plenty more people more talented than myself in Windows system administration, but I felt it was my duty to correct the answer before stirring up more confusion. As such, it actually doesn't appear on the desktop of the user, but rather runs under and is owned by the command line service, if that makes sense. However, the gist of it all is that if you run a process logged in as SSH, regardless of the security context that the process is run in, the process is run under conhost.exe / the command line. Refer the comments of this answer for more information. I am correcting my answer to reflect the accuracy of what actually happens. EDIT: Thank you to Harry Johnston for helping me realize this.

Open notepad from cmd