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I have a Windows 7 x86 system and a printer that is shared publicly in my workgroup. When I try to print to that printer from a Windows 2000 Pro sp4 box, the print job gets into the printers queue, but then hangs the print queue.

From both systems, you can view the print job, but the job never prints until you reboot the windows 7 host system. In addition, you can't delete the print job until you reboot the host windows 7 system also.

Any print jobs that come in after the one from the Win2K box get hung up waiting for the stuck job to print.

What can I do to troubleshoot this problem? Is this a known problem? Am I just using systems that are too far apart and just aren’t speaking a close enough dialect of the same language?

splattne
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Russ
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2 Answers2

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Russ,

If yoy configure the following policies on the Windows 7 host it should work.

Local Computer Policies\Administrative Templates\Printers

Allow print spooler to accept client connections > to enabled

User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Printers\

Point and Print Restrictions > to disabled

The other solution would be to disable Windows 7's UAC control...I believe that fixes the "hangups" as well for the print queue.

TheCleaner
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TheCleaner's answer, which will hopefully remove the need for further action at all. However, if that does not resolve the issue, a reboot is rarely needed to repair a hung print queue. Usually, simply stopping the Print Spooler service, killing the spoolsv.exe process (forcibly if necessary), and then starting the Print Spooler service again should be sufficient under most circumstances. This can also be scripted or achieved from the command line as follows:

net stop spooler
taskkill /im spoolsv.exe
taskkill /f /im spoolsv.exe
net start spooler

While not ideal, it's not as intrusive as having to reboot the machine just to get your print spooler running again. You could also be more creative and set up a task that runs every few minutes to see if the print spooler is actually doing what it is supposed to, and if not, then issue the commands above to get it up and running again.

As a side note, for as long as the Windows print spooler has existed, it has been very fragile, so I'm rather disappointed to hear that this latest version still hangs for any reason whatsoever (although I can't say I'm surprised either). Incidentally, the quick and dirty fix methodology above can be employed on every "non-DOS" version of Windows. Note that although the "taskkill" command was only first introduced in XP, resource kit tool "kill" can be used in its place).

Jessica McKinnon
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