Problem retrieving Windows printers after a Windows update

[Heather Kirk]

Hello all...

I use  AbtReportPrinterPrompter   to retrieve a list of printers,

and display the list to a user for selection.

In several instances now, immediately following a Windows update,

there will be half a dozen or so of my clients (of over 300) experience

that this freezes on some of their computers (but generally not all of them),

or returns a blank list.

They try to select a printer, because for some reason printing stops working.

So they go to the Printer Setup window in my system, but no printers

are listed there, and a call to choose one either freezes for a while, or fails

to return anything...often these users see a message indicating that

No default printer is selected.

It was only through a lot of trial and error, we discovered that removing 1 or more

of the printer drivers (sometimes it was Microsoft PDF, other times it was their

main default printer driver) would get it to work again.  The drivers could then be

reinstalled, and all was well.

After a few years of experiencing this, it appears to be getting worse...more offices,

more computers.  My users get frustrated with me, but I have no other ideas.

And since removing drivers seems to work, and the problem only ever starts right after

a Windows update, I feel that the issue is in Windows.

The users do tell me they can printer from other programs, so now I am doubting my

theory.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this before?

Is there anything I can do to check what is going on?

Sadly, none of us here have ever been able to reproduce the error,

so there is no debugging we can do.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

And I am happy to build in some kind of debugging tool, if anyone has thoughts.

Interestingly, only in rare cases has an office seen this issue more than once.

The vast majority of offices only ever experience this one time.  Possibly because

they reinstalled a driver that was corrupted by the update?

I am using VAST Platform 2023.  I cannot yet upgrade, because a change in 2024

to the unicode system prevents my accessing the database.  My problem...I'm not

worried about that at the moment.  I only mention it because upgrading to the newer

version is not currently an option.

Thanks in advance....

Best Regards.

Heather Kirk

SpinnakerWare Inc.

[Mariano Martinez Peck]

Hi  Heather,

How are you? We have an open dev case for VAST 16 that may relate to what you mentioned.

See the method CgWinPrinterServer class >> basicAllPrinterScreenInfos. More precisely, the bold line here:

1 to: numberPrinters do: [:indx |

(CgPrinterScreenInfo

driverName: 'winspool' "$NON-NLS$"

deviceName: (printerNames at: indx)

outputMedium: (printerPortNames at: indx))

ifNil: [^Dictionary new]

ifNotNil: [:printerScreenInfo |

updatedPrinters

at: (

printerScreenInfo deviceName , ',winspool,' ,

printerScreenInfo outputMedium) "$NON-NLS$"

put: printerScreenInfo]].

Replace that with:

1 to: numberPrinters do: [:indx |

(CgPrinterScreenInfo

driverName: 'winspool' "$NON-NLS$"

deviceName: (printerNames at: indx ifAbsent: [nil])

outputMedium: (printerPortNames at: indx ifAbsent: [nil]))

ifNil: [

"If this happens, it is not necessarily catastrophic, a printer port might be defined, but the printer is not, so just skip it instead of failing and saying we have no printers."

]

ifNotNil: [:printerScreenInfo |

updatedPrinters

at: (

printerScreenInfo deviceName , ',winspool,' ,

printerScreenInfo outputMedium) "$NON-NLS$"

put: printerScreenInfo]].

Regarding the Unicode issue with VAST 2024, please come to support so we can take a look.

Let me know if that helps,

Kind regards,

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Mariano Martinez Peck VAST Lead Consultant Senior Software Engineer  mp...@instantiations.com  @MartinezPeck  /mariano-martinez-peck  instantiations.com

[Heather Kirk]

Just a follow-up, Mariano...

I finally was able to try this with an office that was affected by the problem, and it worked!!

So far, just a single data point, but it is promising.

Thank you again, for passing this along!

Regards,

Heather

[Marcus Wagner]

Hi Mariono,

thank you for your suggestion, but this alone did not help me, it made things worse, now getting a WB.

About 10 years ago I gave up my last physical printer.

I started to use a mobile environment  (Windows 7, 8, 10 and now 11) without any physical printer, optionally supplied only with a single PDF printer, apart from the standard off the shelf configuration.

When I obtained VAST later it was embedded there - but I could not never print anything here.  

I simply refrained to print anything from VAST and forgot about this since then.

Before this suggested fix, this was clearly a consequence of the empty dictionary so that no printer was presented.

But now I retrieve a WB (see attached trace) as the first obstacle is removed by your suggestion. 

Now it stucks a step further, but now with a WB. 

And even when this WB is bypassed, other strange effects will pop up in this context - eg. strange fixed printer properties dialogs, with OK grayed out only letting you to quit and cancel.

There is much more to be repaired here. Other flaws of the tradionational concept will hurt.

I guess, that at the time of the creation of this part (> 30 years ago), environments where rigid and fixed, printers directly connected to a particular server or configured as part of the net.

Nowadays exist virtual printers, WLAN printers, thinprint under VMs or even a virtual printer net (you are printing without target selction and then physically choose the next physical one, wherever you are, to pick up your print from there

by starting the printout there - common in large organisations, with a single printer placed on every floor of the building, while you are moving around or being even remote). 

And it is more or less useless to install model specific drivers on every client, in particular if VAST runs on a laptop which is moving arount.

Although your suggestion is attractive at the first glance, I do not apply it to avoid the following mess.

Kind regards

M

[Mariano Martinez Peck]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for reporting this issue. Are you able to reproduce it? If so, could you check this change in #validateDisplayName? 

Change from this:

pos := printerDisplayInfo findFirst: [ :info | info concatenatedName sameAs: requestedName].

to this:

pos := printerDisplayInfo findFirst: [ :info | requestedName notNil and: [info concatenatedName sameAs: requestedName]].

It is a bit hard for me to fix this since I cannot reproduce it, but please try this change if you can.

Thanks! 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/va-smalltalk/da850ecf-9e46-4960-aa2c-5b5de32728d0n%40googlegroups.com.

[Marcus Wagner]

Hi Mariano,

sorry for the delay in my answer and for my typo, misspelling your name.

Thanks again for your second fix, now the WB is gone, but I came up to the next dead end I mentioned earlier: a font selection prompter is presented which does not allow me to do anything except to cancel.

See printerfontselection.jpg attached.

As my memory begins to fade slightly, it might have s.th. to do with the (initial) Wfw 3.11 necessity to define a default printer first before even to attempt to print anything.

This step was a burden for all mobile machines, as this setting had to be applied after any location change and before attempting to print, sometimes even requiring you to install a device driver or to reboot, a nogo of usability.

But this step has been passed here: the dialog before now successfully has shown all available choices and I selected 

(second picture attached: printerselection.jpg). [this prompter is also shown drirectly when selecting e.g. file>>printer selection].

After that choice, before reaching the next font selection prompter, there is s.th. wrong or missing so that the font selection blocks. 

I did not figure out what happens here (s.th. is calculated with a glimpsing busy sign)

As a result: no print at all. 

I guess this is another result of a long winding road treating printers on the OS side, beginning at early days where (surprise) an (expensive) office printer was shared in a local office net to service all, instead of requiring it to be directly connected to the workstation (even more expensive). Any windows program attempting to print had to adopt to OS changes then as long as a generic approach has been established. Something in the historic development seems to have been missing in VAST long ago and this, rarely used, now strikes back.

Now applying your two fixes, reaching this point caused me to resign already in the past. 

I gave up trying to print anything in Envy/VAST years ago. I used other way: file out, screen shots or whatever.

Long time ago I accept that with a smile, finding this as another original approach to reach the goal of a paperless office...

Kind regards

M