Print Spooler shut off on print

[jmair]

On a Win2003 server is where we have all of our network printers as a print server. All has run great for a few years now. XP clients.

Yesterday, I added an additional printer as normal. But then when somebody would send a print job to any of the HP1022n printers, the print spooler on the Win2003 would stop and all network printers would be off line. Not good.


After uninstalling, reinstalling new drivers and resetting and adding etc etc over and over with almost all printers, I still cant find the problem. I have about 15 of the HP1022n printers, they all use the same driver so I dont think it's a driver issue.

Any suggestions? Ideas?

[Michael]

The most common reason for the spooler to fail is in fact drivers. HP have a reputation for making not so good drivers. Poorly written drivers create memory leaks which eventually crashes the spooler service.

Several things come to mind. You've uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers, but are the printers using HP TCP/IP ports or a standard TCP/IP port?

Have you tried rebooting the server? This can occasionally resolve problems.

I would also try load balancing the printers over multiple servers where possible. If the printers are heavily used, it might be killing the spooler service.

[mullet_man]

On a Win2003 server is where we have all of our network printers as a print server. All has run great for a few years now. XP clients.

Yesterday, I added an additional printer as normal. But then when somebody would send a print job to any of the HP1022n printers, the print spooler on the Win2003 would stop and all network printers would be off line. Not good.


After uninstalling, reinstalling new drivers and resetting and adding etc etc over and over with almost all printers, I still cant find the problem. I have about 15 of the HP1022n printers, they all use the same driver so I dont think it's a driver issue.

Any suggestions? Ideas?

I had a losing battle trying to add the drivers for the 1022n's, older drivers would work e.g. the ones on the disc that came with the printer, but those were not Vista compatable, something I needed and the main reason i updated to the latest drivers from HP, which then caused the servers spooler to crash every time someone printed.

One soloution is to change the driver on the printer properties tab to something like HP Laserjet, they work fine but you get a lower resolution print out 600dpi I think maybe 300 i can't remember exactly.

I ended up using cleanspl.exe from Microsoft to clean the print spooler and download all the latest drivers for our printers and reinstall them, upon doing this the HP 1022 drivers didn't crash the spooler.

Big test will be next week when users start printing, so I will post back on this thread and let you know if it worked.

I did read something when trying to find a solotion that certain HP drivers overwrite files that other printers need when installing new printers, so reinstalling everything hopefully might sort it, also downloading the latest drivers for all your printers might help.

[Gibbo]

I seem to recall moving the spool folder to another drive / location helped with a problem like this for me a couple of years ago.