Local Printers appear to be roaming...

[Arcolite]

We've got an odd issue appearing for one user at the moment.
The user is rather unique as he is the only user that roams between two desktops, both with Local Printer queues. Most have Network/Shared Printers.

What he's found is that he often has no Default printer assigned and even when he picks one he'll come back the next day and it will have reset.

On looking through the event logs on one of the machines I spotted...

Information 10/10/2012 06:47 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to HP LaserJet 3390 / 3392 PCL5,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.
Information 10/10/2012 06:47 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to Prep HM HP1200,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.
Information 09/10/2012 10:40 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to HP LaserJet 3390 / 3392 PCL5,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.
Information 09/10/2012 08:13 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to Prep HM HP1200,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.

It appears that the Local Printer (Prep HM HP1200) from the "Prep" machine is roaming with the user and trying to apply to the other machine (which has the HP LaserJet 3390 as the Local Printer).
When it tries to apply the Default to a printer queue that doesn't exist then the machine is left without a default printer at all.

Currently Local Printers are manually installed and configured. It's not anything in scripts or GPO that's doing it.
Only shared printers are centrally managed via GPO/GPP and to prevent those from roaming we have a logoff script which deletes all Shared Printer connections.

I've never seen a Local Printer roam like this before.
Any ideas how to stop it?

I've already considered using GPP to assign the correct Local Printer as the Default however if I could stop this from happening in the first place that would make things easier.

[Bruce123]

We've got an odd issue appearing for one user at the moment.
The user is rather unique as he is the only user that roams between two desktops, both with Local Printer queues. Most have Network/Shared Printers.

What he's found is that he often has no Default printer assigned and even when he picks one he'll come back the next day and it will have reset.

On looking through the event logs on one of the machines I spotted...

Information 10/10/2012 06:47 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to HP LaserJet 3390 / 3392 PCL5,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.
Information 10/10/2012 06:47 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to Prep HM HP1200,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.
Information 09/10/2012 10:40 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to HP LaserJet 3390 / 3392 PCL5,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.
Information 09/10/2012 08:13 Microsoft-Windows-PrintService 823 Changing the default printer The default printer was changed to Prep HM HP1200,winspool,Ne00:. See the event user data for context information.

It appears that the Local Printer (Prep HM HP1200) from the "Prep" machine is roaming with the user and trying to apply to the other machine (which has the HP LaserJet 3390 as the Local Printer).
When it tries to apply the Default to a printer queue that doesn't exist then the machine is left without a default printer at all.

Currently Local Printers are manually installed and configured. It's not anything in scripts or GPO that's doing it.
Only shared printers are centrally managed via GPO/GPP and to prevent those from roaming we have a logoff script which deletes all Shared Printer connections.

I've never seen a Local Printer roam like this before.
Any ideas how to stop it?

I've already considered using GPP to assign the correct Local Printer as the Default however if I could stop this from happening in the first place that would make things easier.

Assuming you have roaming profiles, one possibility is that someone had setup something in this user's roaming profile to set this local printer as the default and Windows is trying to do this whatever PC they logon to.

Have a look in their roaming profile under Programs->Startup (it could be that they meant to put it in the Allusers Programs-> Startup on this PC, but accidently put it in the user's roaming profile instead). Also look at their registry HKCU.

Or, to eliminate this as a possible cause, you could rename their roaming profile, delete any cached copies from these two PCs and logon them again to see if the problem still exists. If it doesn't, you know there must have been something setup in their roaming profile.

If the problem still exists you could always add a little script to each PC to set the default printer.

Set WshNetwork = CreateObject("Wscript.Network")
WshNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "Local Printer Name"

Save as a .vbs file into the allusers\programs\startup folder.

Probably not worth doing anything at the GPO level for this problem.

Thanks,

Bruce.