I deployed a shared printer via Group Policy, Policies method (not Preferences), per-machine. But only the domain Administrator gets it mapped immediately. Other accounts, even other members of Domain Admins, need a reboot to make it show up for them.
- GPO security filtering is correctly set. Gpresult confirms that the computer policy is getting applied. Group policy debug logs report that the "deployed printer connections" component returns success, with no errors logged. The shared printer info is being recorded under
HKLM\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers\PushedPrinterConnectionStore. - The driver is already pre-installed. Same version, same bitness.
- The standard user can successfully map this printer by manually adding it via the UI.
- Secondary domain admins member account is also affected.
- I reproduced this on an unpatched Vista SP2. This issue is either really old, or depends on serverside configuration.
- Ghostscript PDF, a simple v3 driver, surprisingly works. HP's v3 and Ricoh's v4 don't.
- Process Monitor traces of a successful Administrator gpupdate and a faulty standard user gpupdate are near-identical. There are no access denied events. At the very end, the user's trace returns back to gpupdate just before it's supposed to start writing to
HKCU\Printers\Connections. - Debug symbols indicate that the main call is spoolsv.exe!InternalAddPrinterConnection2, which calls spoolsv.exe!CallAddPrinterConnection, and upon success calls spoolsv.exe!SavePrinterConnectionToRegistry. However this last part is not happening, meaning the previous step failed. Failed in a way that doesn't produce any logs or visible procmon events.
