Clients losing deployed printers

[BJG]

We have W7 clients and printers deployed via Group Policy, and on the whole this works fine. But in one of the IT Rooms PCs keep losing the printer and I can't figure out why. "A Gpupdate /force" followed by a reboot usually fixes the problem. There's nothing in place to delete or remove printers automatically, so once they're there, why don't the darn things just stay there?

 

I've just tried enabling the "Printers preference extension policy processing" for this deployment policy under Administrative Templates / System / Group Policy, and deselecting "Process even if the Group Policy objects have not changed", so maybe that'll help? Too many policies, too little time.

Edited June 17, 2013 by BJG

[sted]

there isnt an old user script set to delete printers at login/logout is there or something else daft?

[BJG]

(...no, it's just an erratic thing which sometimes affects a handful of computers...)

[AngryTechnician]

Printer deployment in Group Policy Preferences has been my nemesis for nearly a year now and this sounds exactly like one of the problems we've had. The only way I got it to stop happening was to set Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy\Printers Policy Processing\Do not apply during periodic background processing

 

Give that a try and see if it makes any difference for you. The only downside I've found is that if you do still have any problems with printers not being applied at logon, you can't use gpupdate /user to get them back, you have to log off and back on.

Edited June 17, 2013 by AngryTechnician

[BJG]

I tried that, but just had another chaotic controlled assessment session where a bunch of computers had randomly lost them once again. So far, it's always been just this one room, and this morning, one PC in the Art Dept. They're all the same type - Dell Optiplex 745/755. Weird. But anyway, I give up...soon as I get the chance I'm going to take that policy, jump up and down on it, and reinstall the printer manually.

[sted]

could you do a script to add them and put it on affected pcs startmenu that way if it work most of the time users can run a script for the times it dosent?