How to delete printer drivers

[Guest Guest]

Got a weird one today.

 

A printer has decided it will only print text upto a certain font size, above that and it just ignores the text and prints out a blank page.

 

It would seem its to do with the printer driver as when i reinstalled the driver on the print server and connected with my own PC all was well. I have tried to delete the drivers from the local PC but they are locked as they are in use. Renaming the folder they are in works but does not solve the problem.

 

Can anyone suggest anything as i have half a dozen PCs which cant print and i dont fancy rebuilding them for something as daft as this.

[kmount]

If you change the driver server side, the new driver will magically appear on the clients after a while or reboot normally.

[Guest Guest]

If you change the driver server side, the new driver will magically appear on the clients after a while or reboot normally.

 

Opps didnt mention, rebooting didnt work

[kmount]

Reboot and look in the event viewer under System for "Print" entries talking about driver installations.

 

There is a manual way of cleaning the drivers out if you want to look at that afterwards?

[6Foot2]

Try this:

 

After logging on locally at the workstation as administrator stop and restart the Spool Service then clear any print jobs still in the queue. Stop and start spool service again.

 

Go to Printers and Faxes, right click in the white space [without selecting any printers, or faxes]

 

Select Server Properties. Then select the Drivers tab. Delete any drivers no longer required. Once the drivers have been deleted then delete the printer

 

Hope it works.

 

I should have said: I have used this to delete a printer from a workstation where the shared server queue no longer existed: I could not find any other way of removing the printer/drivers.

Edited January 6, 2009 by 6Foot2
Add content/clarify post.

[mattx]

Try the clean spooler on the admin bar [ see below ] - it's a GUI tool that restores the print spooler to its original state. It deletes all print jobs, printers, printer drivers, and spool files on a specified local or remote server / PC.

[gshaw]

Try the clean spooler on the admin bar [ see below ] - it's a GUI tool that restores the print spooler to its original state. It deletes all print jobs, printers, printer drivers, and spool files on a specified local or remote server / PC.

 

+1 for cleanspl, did the trick perfectly to clean out broken HP drivers a while back. Just don't delete the TCP/IP monitor driver

[bollo318]

gshaw

I presume you had this trouble. I've just done the same on a machine, I used cleanspl but without realising the consequences I deleted the TCP/IP monitor and now I'm stuck. How do I reinstall it?

 

+1 for cleanspl, did the trick perfectly to clean out broken HP drivers a while back. Just don't delete the TCP/IP monitor driver

[gshaw]

Yup had the duff batch of 2430 drivers a while back, caused no end of trouble - finally sorted now tho

 

As for the TCPIP Monitor Driver I would guess reinstalling the TCPIP stack from network connections should get it back...