Printer Spooler dying when connecting to printers

[J_Worth]

Hello Everyone,

We are having a very strange issue regarding printers:...

We currently use a WSF script to map printers to clients. The problem is that on some clients the print spooler service will crash out and stop - the event log just says that the Print Spooler service terminated unexpectedly.

This issue appears to be random as it seems to affect some computers and not others and some users. Every user has a mandatory profile specified so I don't think it is a profile issue.

We have tried changing from a script method of mapping printers to using the Group Policy Preferences (Server 2008 R2) printer connections but this has not helped.

We use McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7i for anti-virus - is there anyway that this could be affecting the mapping of the printers?

Thanks in advance!

J.Worth.

[edutech4schools]

I had a similar issue at a school. It was a pain to track down but turned out to be a faulty install of adobe reader on a couple of computers. When they printed from Adobe it crashed the spooler.

[ful56_uk]

We have had this too with a dirty HP driver that was a pain. every time it added or tried adding the printer, bye bye spooler and even if you tired looking at the properties of the printer it killed it too.

[J_Worth]

We have had this too with a dirty HP driver that was a pain. .

Do you remember what printer this driver was for? How did you go about solving the issue - is it a simple solution as updating the driver?

[ful56_uk]

it might of been one of there early universal print driver

[SYNACK]

This is usually old drivers, update them to the latest ones first is probably the best idea.