I've had a little problem on a network

[SimpleSi]

Had a big outage on Monday when a schools router failed due to mains outages - got that sorted (Well CLEO Engineer did )

 

Afterwards a couple of people complaining that Word was crashing on them - it worked on one machine I tried so I thought no major problem and said I'll be back later in week to look at it.

 

Today, everyone complaining that word doesn't work, testbase doesn't work and Easiteach (needed for Abacus) doesn't work.

 

I'm starting to think I've a nasty little virus hidden away. So downloading Malawarebytes to see if it can find anything when I found one teacher who said everythings working fine for them.

 

Checked her machine and noticed that she wasn't defaulted to laser (via PCL driver) she was defaulted to the laser (via Postscript driver). (I've some linux netbooks that need Postscript based printer)

 

Turns out server laser PCL driver print queue was causing all the problems. It won't delete either so I've recreated another one (called it LaserB and deployed it as default for everyone- all problems gone.

 

Si

BTW Anyone know how to manually remove an errant server printer/queue so it doesn't appear anymore?

[featured_spectre]

For the printer problem......the machine that hosts the printer, stop the spooler, start the spooler, delete all jobs. Enjoy

[SimpleSi]

For the printer problem......the machine that hosts the printer, stop the spooler, start the spooler, delete all jobs. Enjoy

 

Doesn't work

 

Its right fouled up!

 

Si

[featured_spectre]

Remove printer completely, take off all drivers, reinstall, reattach printer again??

[FN-GM]

Remove printer completely, take off all drivers, reinstall, reattach printer again??

 

It wont let you remove it until the print queue is clear. Thats why he is asking for a way to remove it forcibly.

[featured_spectre]

Make a batch file with the following in it.

 

net stop spooler

del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd

del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl

net start spooler

 

Then run it on the afflicted machine. That should do the trick.

[SimpleSi]

Ta - I'll try it next week

 

Si

[Michael]

You can use the 2003 Resource Kit which includes a spooler cleaner.