Windows 7 printing being a nightmare

[mrbios]

I can't work this out, the windows 7 print spooler will randomly crash at various points throughout the day, only restarting the PC or restarting the print spooler will fix it, and once the print spooler has been restarted the printer no longer exists for the student and needs manually readding

If i log off prior to restarting the print spooler and logon as an administrator the printer appears but you can't print to it, if you try to readd the printer without restarting the print spooler you can an error message ending in 0x0000007E or along those lines

The printer involved: Canon LBP5970
Driver: Tried the PCL6 and UFR II drivers
PC: Random between the 9 PCs involved, all the same hardware and imaged with the same image

I'm tempted to completely rebuilt the image and see if that fixes it as it seems not many people appear to be getting this issue, this is on windows 7 32bit if that makes much difference

pleaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaase help me, tearing my hair out

[Gatt]

When Win7 was in beta we had no issues with printing at all - in fact printers that didnt work in Vista, were working in Win7
Then HP released the Universal Printer Driver andthat has pretty much screwed it all up now... So much so we no longer use HP for printing

[mrbios]

Oh i have noticed the awful hp universal printing driver, had to setup a HP laserjet on someones laptop the other day.....that was a nightmare too, but at least once i got that working it stayed working

[SYNACK]

@mrbios - it sounds very much like a driver issue to me, had this kind of problem a lot with older messy drivers. Try grabbing them off windows update or via the windows update catalog ( Microsoft Update Catalog ) to get hopefully more stable ones.

@Gatt - Weird that you have had issues with the hp Universal drivers, for us they have been the most well behaved ones of the lot easily coping with everything client wise first on a 2003 server then a 2008R2 one. We do only have 5 of them though. Its our Brother ones that gave us trouble, like Windows 7 drivers that 'only' work with Windows 7 and bomb on Vista and XP.

[mrbios]

SYNACK - I've spoken to our canon supplier who claims he has never had any issues with the drivers on windows 7 in the past, what's the best way to have driver isolation setup on server 2008R2? These printers are relativly new (the model is less than 1 years old) so shouldn't really have any issues except that the drivers appear to just be an adapted driver from the earlier 5960 model

I previously tried with driver isolation disabled on both server and clients, i've now tried setting it to enabled on both and i'll see how that goes, when/if they fail again i'll make sure the same fix of just restarting the spooler fixes that as well. I think if that doesn't work though i'll just try remaking my windows 7 image from fresh and see if that solves it

[SYNACK]

A supplier admitting fault

Anyhow the any time I have had those 7E errors it has turned out to be solved by newer more compatible drivers so just going on experience for the diagnosis. I think that you would probably want the isolation to be on if they are misbehaving but I am not sure if this will fully prevent a driver crash out of the spooler for that specific printer. It may save the others but I have no idea whether it will recover the printer in question, are there any universal drivers available or ones from the catalog above to give a try?

The only other way that I got around this was mapping the printers persistently and not remapping as the crashes usually happened on adding the printers or refreshing the drivers. It usually crashed out the spooler a bunch of times while mapping them but after that it worked ok. That method does rely on a small number of roaming profile accounts though and I was only able to do it as it was a small business client with a limited number of users.

[mrbios]

In the next few months hopefully we'll be buying uniflow, perhaps the uniflow universal driver will save my bacon, at the moment i have tried the UFRII and PCL6 drivers, there are also "Generic PCL6" drivers which im yet to try (they are version 1.00 so may be newly released) so i'll give those a go before making a new image as well

[Seker]

You could also try the Samsung UPD as it works with other manufacturers' printers. It's lighter than HPs (which are so full of bloat it's scary) and probably much less buggy.