Printer Spooler stops

[button_ripple]

We have just moved 2 of our printers onto our server 2008 box. They all work, except suddenly the server is attaching itself to random printers that are shared on other computers. We cannot delete them and the print spooler on the server stops whenever a print job is passed through the random printers.

Any ideas?

I have attached a screen shot of the printers folder, the 2 random printers are the ones that say (redirected). These printers just disappear and are replaced by other ones, then they disappear and so on...

Just found out the print spooler also stops when we disconnect out remote desktop connection session.

[srochford]

the "redirected" printer is because you're connecting using remote desktop and telling MSTSC to redirect the printer - ie your workstation has a printer (network or local) and RD is allowing you to run a process on the server which prints to the printer connected to your workstation.

When you go to connect with mstsc, click the "options" button, go to local resources and untick printers - this will stop the printers being redirected.

Don't see why connecting to a printer like this should stop the spooler - is there anything in the event log about a printer problem (it's conceivable that when the server installs the printer driver something is going wrong).

The other thing you can do to stop this being so much of a problem is to set the recovery options on the print spooler service - basically, you can say "when the service stops, restart it" and that way at least the printers keep on going while you try and find what's wrong.

[FN-GM]

Most probably a driver issue, are you using the proper server 2008 drivers? If you are try some more.

Z

[button_ripple]

The problem in the event log is:

Faulting application spoolsv.exe, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791956c, faulting module ntdll.dll, version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791a7a6, exception code 0xc0000374, fault offset 0x000b015d, process id 0x1440, application start time 0x01c9230b8c6b1dba

The event ID is: 1000

I am using server 2008 drivers for the printers - except the "staffroom" printer which only has an XP one, but this still prints fine and the problem still occurs even when the printer is uninstalled.

I have told the server to restart the service, but this doesn't seem to help.

[Richie]

We had the same problem with the spooler freezing. I found the problem to be the Laserjet 2600 driver we had installed. This was an XP driver effectively (the HP site listed the same download for XP, Vista and 2008).

I fixed this through trial and error, the one thing that seemed to do the trick was to disable Bi-directional communication on the properties dialog.

The printer has now been going OK for about 3 weeks.