Print Spooler Crashing At Startup Win 7 64bit

[Colindean2000]

Hi all

 

After a bit of advice help with a print spooler problem we've been having.

 

Issue: Print Spooler seems to crash at start up on random Win 7 64bit machines. Connecting remotely to the services of a machine with this issue the print spooler says it's running but until we restart it the user has no printers, and this does not always remedy the problem.

 

It's been ongoing for a long time now but just lately has started to get more frequent, it seems to happen most in our library and seems to be completely random.

 

The PCs are Dell OptiPlex 9020 all in ones.

 

Has anyone else come across this? Could it be related to a printer driver? We used to have a HP 4700 in there using the universal print driver but have since replaced this with a Ricoh copier however the PCs still retain the HP driver until I can reimage them at Easter. My thoughts are that it's either the HP driver or a bug in Windows 7 which has never been fixed.

 

Any thoughts, comments, questions welcome

 

Thanks all

[gtg93]

We had this at a number of schools when we first moved to Win7 - we logged a support call with MS and it was indeed related too HP drivers (not specifically the UPD):

 

I can't guarantee it'll work for you, I would reccommend trying the following on the client computers:

 

Rename “HPCPN083.dll” – If you run a search for this file from the root of C:, there will be multiple versions of this. Rename ALL of them to “HPCPN083.old”.There will also be a version saved within “C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository” – this one won’t rename, ignore that one.

 

It would appear that this dll is installed with HP drivers, but isn’t actually needed for the printer to function correctly. From looking at some event viewer entries, this particular dll can cause the local spooler to crash.

 

Disable HP Services – Run “services.msc” from the “run” prompt. You will likely have either “Net Driver HPZ12” or “Pml Driver HPZ12” listed as a service, maybe both. If so, disable them both so that they’re no longer running and so they won’t start up again.

 

Again, these services are installed during driver installation, but printing does not rely on them. They’re linked to the HP Universal Print drivers, and MS have found problems with them and recommend they be disabled. The UPDs weren't actually used for the PCs that were affected by this issue at my schools but these drivers are still there.

Net Driver HPZ12 : Provides channelized data transfers over the network for scan and fax.

Pml Driver HPZ12 : For USB connected devices that support PML or for network SNMP, provides the ability to determine what features a device has using printer automatic configuration and device status.

 

Install Hotfix – Install this hotfix from the MS website.

 

This is an official MS hotfix that they have released to fix an issue where network printers are incorrectly shown / detected as being offline. Since it has not being properly tested by MS.

 

 

Hope that helps... I've got these processes setup to run from a batch file. If you find this works on a machine for you, let me know and I'll happily send you the files. I'd advise testing on just the one or two clients first!

Edited March 2, 2016 by gtg93

[Colindean2000]

Thanks gtg93 i'll give it a go and report back