Windows 7 - Group Policy Deployment of Printers

[Iain.Faulkner]

Afternoon all,

 

Got a problem with printers being deployed through group policy.

 

We're running a windows server 2008 environment with most of our clients running Windows 7 (having upgraded from Vista in the summer).

 

All our networked printers are deployed using group policy and under Vista this seemed to work fine.

 

Since we upgraded to 7, we've been experiencing problems in that for some machines the group policy will run fine and allow people to use the printer and for others it won't.

 

I've checked a few things on one client where the policy deploys fine and on one where it doesn't, and they both seem to have the same group policies applying to them (on the report I've produced for both machines, neither makes reference to the printer policy). My only guess is that the policy is not being called correctly, but I don't know how to resolve this.

 

Has anyone come across this before? Does anyone have a solution?

 

Many thanks in advance.

[Soulfish]

We've had some fun times with W7 and deploying printers. After eventually getting GPP to deploy printers we found that some machines wouldn't deploy some printers at all - despite deploying other printers in the same policy. That issue seems to have resolved its self, but now we've got a weird issue where printers will disappear part way through a users session.

 

I suspect its something to do with http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/60087-win-7-dhcp-netlogon-firewall-microsoft-confirm-bug.html, and printers to reapplying correctly when updated by GPP as we're getting all of the same error messages.

[BryanDavidWilliams]

We have had decent success deploying printers with a mix of the Print Management Console and then updating default settings with group policy on the GPO server. We have some issues with printers not updating when switching between OUs. For some reason it will retain old OU settings even after moved and a gpupdate /force has been run. I can look at the gpupdate /result and see that they should not be there. Confusing but we never switch OU's with out a re-image so it has worked well for us so far.

 

Printers will never work right between the MS print team who can barely get versions of their own software out in cycle with OS and SP releases and HP's Driver issues I give up on the perfect print solution.

[hcrejazz]

We had the exact same problem. This fixed it. Microsoft KB976399.

[Iain.Faulkner]

thanks hcrejazz, I'll give that a go :-)

[Iain.Faulkner]

Nope, still the same :-(