Spooler service crashing on Windows 7 clients

[randle]

Hi

I'm delivering printers to my Windows 7 computers through shared connections hosted on a DC via GPP and on the most part have been successful however the spooler service appears to be crashing on some of the computers meaning that all printer connections, networked and local, disappear sporadically until this service is restarted.

I've been doing some googling and it appears the most common cause for spooler service crashes are dodgy drivers. In the past I've always used Windows 2003 drivers when adding printers to my printer server (Windows 2003 DC) and have always been fine on XP clients however I'm wondering whether I should be using the Windows 7 drivers instead. Seems pretty obvious I know but have never been clear on which ones should be used. I'm currently testing a printer with Windows 7 drivers and so far it seems to work but am checking here while I wait to see how successful this is.

Also would like to know if others have experienced spooler crashes in this scenario!?

[SYNACK]

Dodgy drivers, very common, use the latest drivers (server 2k8 r2,7) if avalible.

[RobFuller]

Not got an HP 6000 by any chance?

[randle]

So the drivers should definitely be the client drivers rather than hosting server (Win2003) versions?

@RobFuller: I don't as it goes but do have hp CP3505, 3600 & 3800 printers

[bossman]

We have found the HP universal drivers PCL 5.5 to be very effective with all our makes of printers from HP.

[randle]

The driver I'm currently testing is the HP Universal driver PCL6 and all appears to be working normally and more importantly haven't had a spooler service crash today yet!!

From this test I'm taking it that the client OS driver is the driver I should be using although from the documentation this driver appears to span many OS's including Windows 7 anyway.

[RobFuller]

@randle only reason I ask we had some real problems with the 6000's once we moved to Windows 7 (x64) and they don’t even support the HP universal driver. It’s a very odd printer.

The universal driver is good, we did have problems with an earlier version being very slow to load but that appears to have been fixed, the other option is driver isolation if you decide to run a 2k8R2 printserver.

Where are you based in Chelmsford anyway?

[randle]

I've not had the please of the 6000 model!

Chelmer Valley High School, right next to Broomfield hospital. You not RM'd anymore? Not seen you on Communities for some time!!