How do I delete an individual print job from the queue...?

[Koldov]

A minor inconvenience/niggle, but something I've never got to the bottom of... Like a lot schools we print a fair bit and occasionally a job will get stuck for $deity knows what reason and almost every time I'm not told about it until much, much later when loads of other jobs have stacked up behind it (although to be fair that doesn't take long). It's not a daily occurrence which is why I've never put in much time/effort into sorting it out, but it's just happened and reminded me, so I thought I'd ask...

 

They always seem to fail somewhere between the client and the server as they never appear on the actual printer, but if I go onto the server and try to delete the job from the queue, 99% of the time it just won't delete (it says it's deleting but never actually does). This means I have to do the nuclear option and restart the print spooler service and unfortunately everybody on site loses whatever they were printing or what was in the queue (most of it had probably been printed elsewhere or was to be collected later, but still)...

 

I wonder if 'Print Directly to the Printer' and 'Render Print Jobs on the Client Computer' settings which although originally done to lighten the load on the small VM print server (and fix some other issues), might be hindering my attempts to manage the jobs in the queue...?

 

I'm thinking of it mainly being an issue when the job has not been fully rendered (maybe they closed their laptop after pressing print), or some error in the transmission of a large print job over the Wi-Fi...?

[6Foot2]

Maybe this? Pause the print queue, find the spool file on the print server (From memory in C:\Windows\system32\Spool\ ... or something like that?) delete the (naughty) file then release the queue again.

 

My recollection may not be 100% accurate (it's a while since I have done this) but perhaps someone can jump in and correct me where I have erred? It may not be the correct approach at all: Just a suggestion.

 

[Squip]

Do you have an auth pop up when printing? If so, it could be this issue: https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/JobsStuckWithStatusOfPrinting

 

If so, you can kill printisolationhost.exe (sometimes have to do it twice) and it skips the 'bad' job and continues.

[Koldov]

Maybe this? Pause the print queue, find the spool file on the print server (From memory in C:\Windows\system32\Spool\ ... or something like that?) delete the (naughty) file then release the queue again.

 

Thanks, I'll investigate this when it happens next.

 

Do you have an auth pop up when printing? If so, it could be this issue: https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/JobsStuckWithStatusOfPrinting

 

Thanks, unfortunately however the message isn't 'paused - spooling' it just says 'printing', we don't use windows 10 modern store apps, we DO have 'Client-Side rendering', there isn't built in authentication (although we do use the Job Accounting feature - but if this goes wrong it still goes to the printer and errors there) and lastly we don't use Papercut.