Fix Spooler Windows 10
Endike Baur
Does the spooler stop, or is it crashing and restarting? I had vicious troubles with one of my few (4) Windows 7 laptops. Turned out to be Adobe stuff that cleared up when I updated to the latest and greatest Acrobat Pro. I think it had to do with the fact that it was Win7 x64.
No new drivers, it is this one laptop in the network, user said that it started to happen when a PDF file was opened from the email. The service just stops and stays on stop mode. I normally delete the printer connections registry and restart and that does it, but not this time.
When this happens look in the listed printers on the print server to see if it is any one particular printer that is offline with hung up print jobs. It may well just be a particular printer with a corrupt driver.
It may still generate a file with a corrupt driver. I would sit and watch the pint server to see if you can get an indication of something going on. WHen you set these up did you set them to spool on the client side or the server side?
I am glad I only have 3 HP printers. Anyway, finding the problematic printer is probably going to be the only solution here. Watch and see what happens as the print server utility may give you an indication of the problematic one when the spooler service stops.
Not a fix, per se, but something I did when we had similar issues on an old 2012R2 Terminal Server, was to add a task to the Task Scheduler to restart the spooler every day at a set time. It was a simple batch file something like:
Building from scratch is a last resort, with over 200 printers it would be a tedious task as I would not want to import the printers from the troublesome server. It may have to happen, I was just hoping for some way to isolate what driver is causing the issue. May just be wishful thinking though.
We have seen this problem on two Windows 11 systems with the latest Thunderbird version. The last system had version 115.5.1. The first system was a couple of months ago and I do not remember what version we used there.
What happens is that the print spooler is stopped (often, but not always) when Thunderbird is started. A manual start of the spooler after starting Thunderbird then enables printing again on the system.
On the first one we did not know what was causing the print spooler to stop. We wiped the system, re-installed Windows and everything else. The problem was gone after that. In hindsight we do not know why this fixed it. Apparently this is not just a problem in Thunderbird alone?
On the second one we added an extra Windows user with administrative rights and changed the original user to a standard user. Then Thunderbird (or another culprit?) no longer has sufficient privileges to kill the spool server on startup of Thunderbird and that seems to work.
The primary component of the printing interface is the print spooler. The print spooler is an executable file that manages the printing process. Management of printing involves retrieving the location of the correct printer driver, loading that driver, spooling high-level function calls into a print job, scheduling the print job for printing, and so on. The spooler is loaded at system startup and continues to run until the operating system is shut down.
Applications that print create a printer device context (DC). When an application creates a printer DC, the spooler performs necessary tasks such as determining the location of the required printer driver and then loading that driver. The print spooler also determines the data type used to record the print job.
Custom data types can be added to the spooler by installing additional printer drivers and print processors. A print job is a document stored internally and encoded by using one of the supported data types, and a print job may contain one or more pages of output. The print job may consist of multiple forms; for example, a job may consist of one envelope and three pages of A4 paper. A print job is defined (or bracketed) by the StartDoc and EndDoc functions.
The default data type for a print job is the enhanced metafile. An EMF record is a compact structure used to store text output commands, raster graphics commands, and so on. When an application calls StartDoc, the spooler creates a spool file and a data file and begins storing EMF records in the spool file. Each time the application calls one of the GDI drawing functions, one or more new EMF records are created and stored in the spool file. The spool and data files are created in an operating system directory. The spooler uses the spool file to store EMF records and uses the data file to record the type of form, the data type for the print job, the target printer, and so on. The spooler deletes these files when the job has successfully printed.
I'm experimenting with a Zebra TTP8200 thermal printer. For my application I need to print plotter type traces continuously until the user hits a stop button. I've had a play with the ZPL language and I can successfully generate bitmap data and dump out my bitmap a line (or few lines) at a time by outputting the ZPL as raw data.
I'm using some Microsoft demo code to output the raw data to the printer and this works great, bar one issue: the spooler. It turns out that every time I output some data using the MS rawprn.exe code it is actually spooled as a print job and then transmitted to the printer. This takes up to 10 seconds to get through the spooler, obviously too slow. Disabling spooling in the driver doesn't help, it just means that the program hangs while the job is passed through the spooler and printing completes.
Is there a way to bypass the spooler and output data straight to this USB printer? My research so far hasn't turned up anything likely looking in the Windows API. Ideally, I'd like to be able to use the printer like it was a serial printer - open the port and shove data in.
Yes, absolutely. It's built into most OSs, printing raw via USB is just a bit less obvious than Ethernet and COM/LPT. Note, many applications, such as notepad are incapable of printing raw, so your application needs to support this as well.
After some more digging around, I found this interesting article on using Windows printer functions provided by usbprint.sys. With a bit of hacking the sample code there seemed to work. I think I'll take this route.
The below class in C# is something I've adapted from a Microsoft Knowledgebase article. There are methods in this class to send the print job as a string and byte[]. Please note there are some references to log4net in there that can be removed/replaced with the logging framework of your choice. :
Under Control Panel and Administrative tools theres a new option here in windows 7 labled Print Management. From here you can see all the printers you have ever installed and all the drivers that are still amongst the system. under the option All Drivers on the left is where I found the print driver I new was hanging around somewhere but couldnt find to remove, Right clicking on the printer name and choosing Remove Printer Package allowed for windows 7 to scan for and find the drivers and allows you to delete them. (Similar to the Server properties Drivers Tab from previous windows versions)
Next. start>run>c:\windows\system32\print.exe. Right click on the file. Change ownership of the file from Trusted Installer to Adminstrators. Once Administrator has ownership, change permissions for all listed user to Full Control. Apply and OK.
My guess is that this is a bad driver. You might download Process Monitor and attempt to find out which files are accessed when you start the print spooler. My guess is that you have a bad print driver or print monitor.
This isn't an elegant solution, but if you have a bad driver, you may have to manually clear the subdirectories under C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers to prevent the drivers from loading. Also make sure you don't have any print monitors (monitoring consumer-level printers), PDF printers, FAX printers, etc. running.
I've been looking at eliminating NTLM use in my domain, and noticed that Windows clients' print spooler service is falling back to using NTLM to reach the print server. Digging deeper, it's making a request that I can't decipher at all...
The print spooler keeps crashing even though I have tried and re-tried the recommended solutions of a) deleting spooled print jobs, b) going into Services and re-starting the print spooler, c) verifying it is set to start automatically and that the recovery modes are to restart, d) verifying that the RPC is running and dependent, etc. It continues to crash a few moments after manually restarting. Very frustrating.
The printer is working just fine, but the computer just can't seem to find it using wireless access or USB connections. Would appreciate other suggestions for how to solve this. Could it be a driver problem?
The problem began first as not being able to print messages or attachments from Firefox gmail. Initially I could print from WORD. But, now I can't seem to do any printing because the print spooler keeps crashing.
Thanks for taking an interest in the HP Support Forums After reading your post I see that you require assistance regarding issues with printing because of print spooler crashes. It will be a delight to assist you here.
Then download the latest full feature driver from -en/drivers/selfservice/swdetails/hp-officejet-pro-8620-e-all-in-one-printe... and install it on the computer after selecting the correct operating system.
Perform all these steps patiently as it is critical to resolving the issue. Good luck to you. I will keep a watch for your response. Please note that I am not overloading you with steps but instead, giving you more information to work with. We are as eager as you are to get the issue fixed. I request you to perform all these steps till the issue is fixed.
c80f0f1006