Here is a strange one. We have a hand full of users each day that are suddenly unable to print. All use printers shared from a Windows 2003 SP2 print server and some have local USB printers in addition. The issue manifests itself in a variety of ways, some get an error saying the print job failed, some get no indication of an issue, but nothing prints. When this happens to a user, they are "usually" unable to print to ANY printers until this is resolved. Reboots and spooler stop/starts do not resolve the symptoms. The only thing we have been able to find is for lack of a better way to put it...to kick the drivers i.e. install another printer, or remove / re-add a printer. We did move the server these printers are shared from to a different network segment but I see no issues with 80% of our users and I have no indication of an issue on the print server. There is no common thread I can find with printer models, location of users, permissions, software etc. The only common item is that print server, but the issue looks like it is on the client. I'm perplexed. Any thoughts??
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I'd take a look at the event logs on the client and the event logs on the server thats having the issues. If you need to "kick the drivers" this makes me think that something with the drivers is somehow getting corrupt.
For this all to be associated with the same print server I'd wonder if its sometimes dishing out bad drivers, or some other failure is messing up the system. I would look for errors indicating network connectivity problems and also monitor system performance on the server (e.g. Is it hitting 100% CPU usage at some point and as a result its sending bad requests that is messing up the client?)
No errors in the event logs of either the clients or the server and the perfmon counters on the server do indicate an issue either....CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, RPC, Work Process, TCP/IP etc, all are normal on the server.
Once a client is affected, even locally connected printers can not be used. We do have another print server for driver testing, but like I said, even local (direct connected) printers can't be used so I would naturally assume the other print server wouldn't work either.
The IP change was a result of the print server moving into our Data Center and out of our HQ. This is across a 100 Mb WAN that is only about 10 to 20% utilized most of the day.
