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