Printers in Windows 11

[TravisG]

So probably looking over something really small, but I can't find it. Right now, I'm in the testing stages of deploying Windows 11 via a MECM task sequence. After about a week of tweaks and VM reverts, I finally got a successful upgrade without Teams and the other junk that gets installed.

 

Before the upgrade, printers worked just fine...even with all the print nightmare updates. Instead of GPOs, re deploy printers from our print server using WMI. The reason we don't do a direct add is because we use pCounter.

 

$printclass = [wmiclass]"win32_printer"
$printclass.AddPrinterConnection("\\server.fqdn.edu\Sample Printer")

 

And this worked with no issue. Then after I upgrade to Windows 11, this breaks. Gives me different error codes for different printers (3221225480 & 1722). I checked to see if the printers were configured any differently, but they're aren't. Again, these are in production with Windows 10 just fine. We also pre-install the Universal HP Drivers, so that's not a problem as well. I'm not sure if Windows 11 supports type 3 drivers or not, but that would be a bit weird if it didn't. Even then, pCounter is unable to support Type 3 drivers...according to my reading.

 

I just can't figure out the issue here.

[GaryPad]

PCounter uses a custom port monitor, and as part of the transition from Type 3 drivers in Windows to Type 4 class drivers, my understanding is that these will no longer be supported (you're supposed to use the print pipeline instead). It's possible that Windows 11 mandates against custom port monitors completely?

Can you set up a shared test printer that just uses a Standard TCP/IP port and try adding the connection to that? If you can then it must mean an issue with the custom port monitor. If you're not using the PCounter popup utility you could try using an interim queue to print to: with that shared test printer, change the port on it to be a local one: \\server.fdqn.edu\Sample Printer and then see if your Windows 11 clients can print to that. It means doubling up on your queues - so clients print to that one which spools and then prints to the actual queue with the Pcounter port monitor on it, but as it's all local on the server it should be pretty quick.

Check with PCounter as to whether Windows 11 is a supported operating system.

[TravisG]

So, looks like I can add it to a non-lab computer running Windows 11. So that tells me it is some policy affecting it. Now, we did have to fumble around with settings to get Print Nightmare stuff to go away. I think the number one thing was fooling around with the Print Spooler files. I'm guessing when I reverted back to the September files, the W11 upgrade tried to install the latest files, but there was a conflict somewhere. I didn't even think to test this because it was working before the upgrade.

 

But this is a good starting point.