I have a server that hosts an application which gets used over TS/RDP. The clients are allowed to print the application output to their local printer. The setup works great except that periodically, clients' print jobs fail to print. The spooler crashes....but the service doesn't terminate, and so it won't restart itself. The only solution we've come up with is restarting the spooler service manually from the MMC, but we only know to do it when the client calls and asks "what is the problem with the server?!?! its broken!" at which point we have already failed to provide good service. I wrote a batch script to restart the spooler automatically every few minutes and installed it into scheduled tasks....but that didn't work at all (even though the task *was* running). When the spooler hangs, the script just exits silently, and the net stop/start commands don't return an error code.
The problem started about three months ago. Nobody on our end changed anything. Nothing has been picked up on the virus scanner (NOD32) and no windows updates have happened. We think that one of our clients installed a new printer around then but can't be sure.
When I looked at the server, all the printers had been installed locally (as opposed to installing the drivers only). I removed all the unnecessary local printers, leaving the drivers intact. And we are still getting the same error.
The only errors in the system log are error code 1111, which is 99% of the time because the client has Microsoft Document Imager installed as a printer and we don't have the drivers for it loaded on the server.
Searching on EE and google abroad reveals tons of people that are having similar problems, but aggregating through the solutions and problem statements has revealed nothing of any use.
I am at my wits end....how can I fix this?
Start Free Trial
