Print Spooler Crashing

[Maybell Hughs]

I ran across Microsoft's Application Verifier but am unsure whether this will provide the information I'm looking for. I also want to minimize disruption to the client. Print Spooler is currently set to always restart upon a crash, and it does so every time with no noticeable impact to print services. If I have Application Verifier monitor the Print Spooler and related processes, will Application Verifier stop Print Spooler from rebooting when it crashes? The crashing doesn't occur often enough for me to watch for a crash and manually restart the Print Spooler.

When you will know the one that bug, start by validating that your print driver are in Isolated Mode. Such mode isolate the driver, thus when it fail only the print queue related to that driver fail and it recover.

Hello Everyone, I am here to say I am having a very similar issue. Multiple Microsoft updates from KB5003637, KB5004476 onwards install something that stops most of my windows 10 workstations printing. It takes down the spooler, and the instant its restarted it goes down again. have set service to be auto restart etc.

I have had some luck allowing the problematic updates to first install, then uninstalling them and then using wushowhide.diagcab to block that particular update. Trouble is its getting to be more and more updates that contain the issue to block, its a lot of labour to nanny all these win10 workstations to not update.

I searched an affected 21h1 workstation today for LMADQPLANG.DLL in this folder c:\windows\system32driverstorefilerepositorylmadqp40.inf\amd64_neutral_ee8f1da52eed13dfamd64\ and near there, and although there were ones with very similar names, that particular one (LMADQPLANG.DLL ) was not present. I had show hidden files enabled. I then did a windows search for LMADQPLANG.DLL inside the c:\windows\ system32\driverstore\filerepository\ folders and it also did not find that file maybe its manufacturer or printer specific?

I got a fresh fully updated 21H1 machine that would not find any new updates. Added printers one at a time they crashed on lexmark drivers, used event viewer to see it was pointing to a dll from my old lexmark drivers (I googled the dll name). Uninstalled (by quickly restarting spooler and deleting broken lexmarks) printers and tried last specific printer versions from 2017 - spooler crashed. I uninstalled those and got the universal drivers from July 2021 installed and NO SPOOLER CRASHES ANYMORE. Tried it on several affected machines.

I believe it might be to do with V3 vs V4 print drivers and the latest rushed updates from microsoft for print nightmare not playing nice. Its my limited understanding that v3 is pre windows 8 and V4 are 8, 10 and 11 drivers. I think the key at least for me, is tracking down the driver concerned ad getting it up to date?

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.

I have a print server running on a VM using Server 2008 R2. The clients ar all HP Dc7900s, with Office 2010. They are printing to an HP4014n, as well as a RICOH 6001. More than occasionally, the printers read offline. If I go into the services on the individual client and restart the spooler then the printers come online. Why does the spooler keep stopping and how can I prenvent it from happening so often?

A Print Spooler crash, 99% of the time happens because of a Vendor Printer Driver. The best way to determine the cause of crash of Print Spooler is to catch a process dump of Print Spooler and using Windbg (Windows Debugger) to analyze.

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.

Unfortunately, I have also had to follow Tim's advice - but I learned the hard way. I originally got an error in Vista Business (ick) saying "Spooler SubSystem App has stopped working." Then no printers would work HP, Epson, or otherwise. Could not get the Spooler to start again without crashing. So I followed similar advice from another source (basically the same instructions as what Tim has linked) that had me completely uninstalling Adobe Reader and all my other printers, deleting printer keys from the registry, deleting from C:/Windows/System32/Spool, and then uninstalling and reinstalling Windows Scan and Print functionality. As long as I don't ever reinstall Adobe Reader (any version - and I've tried as far back as 7), then I'm fine. I've found Foxit to be a good substitute to Reader.

You'd think Adobe would have a fix for this already. Especially when people are migrating away from their software. I can never install another piece of Adobe software on my system again because it crashes the printers, so my plans for Photoshop or Acrobat are out the window. I've got a system that's only a couple of months old, too. This sucks - big time.

Other forums - especially those from Windows and Adobe - will tell you it's a problem with your print drivers. I had 3 different newer printers go down and none would function - even when installed alone with the latest and greatest drivers - once Reader was installed. They all work fine on their own when Adobe software is not installed. As soon as Adobe Reader (7,8,or 9 versions) is installed, the print spooler crashes again. I guess I'm sticking with Foxit.

I have a client that has been dealing with this issue on a large scale. Close to 200 computers running Adobe, most with HP 1022 printers as local printers. Since Adobe isn't responding to the issue with an update, we (they) are migrating away. For most users downloading Foxit reader and using that to view and print .PDF's solves the issue. Shame that Adobe is losing customers over this but when you don't fix the problem there isn't much of a choice.

Our problem is we heavily use Adobe Pro and Adobe Standard to create documents. HP was zero help. But, I hooked up a Dell 1110 printer to one of the computers and the problem disappeared. So we are replacing the printers using a volume purchase from Dell. This was less expensive than continuing to waste labor cost on trying to solve the problem of driver/software incompatibility.

Every program that prints that I have tested so far releases these temporary files after the print job is over and they are deleted (presumably by the spooler). Printing with Adobe Reader leaves them in the folder. Next time you start a print job, the spooler crashes.

I downloaded Foxit, and without any other changes, it works fine. No crashes. Unambiguously, the problem is with Adobe. Should be fairly easy to fix (probably Adobe just has to release the files so the spooler can delete them).

I'm (a) really disappointed that Marjon01 had to reinstall Windows OS to fix this, but (b) really pleased that we seem to be coning down on the problem. When I originally discovered the problem 2 years ago it was with a Dell Inspiron computer with a Vista 32 bit OS, which required reinstallation by Dell remote tech support (what a hassle - 1.5 days of downtime prior to the fix). However, in the intervening period I have discovered progressively more efficient ways to fix the spooler problem and reduce downtime. I think that this combination generates corrupt registry keys (which we are told not to fool with, and also to avoid registry cleaners), but there was no way to efficiently delete and reinstall the printer driver because the printer spooler kept stopping before I could delete the printer driver. However, I purchased an online application called "Printer Spooler Fix Wizard" for about $29 which deletes the corrupt registry keys and the HP 1020 printer driver simultaneously (sorry, I do not know where I purchased that application, but it enjoys a coveted place on my Start menu!). This wizard allows you to become functional very quickly and delete the offending document in the printer cache in order to start over again. Now when this happens, I either (a) convert every incoming PDF to a Adobe 9.X-compatable PDF and then print it on the HP 1020 printer (which is somewhat time-consuming) or (b) if I am feeling lucky, just try to print the PDF on its own without conversion using Adobe 9.X. If I then get a spooler alert, then I simply run the wizard (as discussed above), reinstall the 1020 driver and then re-render the incoming PDF using Acrobat 9.X.

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