Question

Printing pdfs locks up print spooler.

Asked by: IndyNCC

We have an XP Pro sp 3 machine that was recently cleaned up by Norton for a virus.  Everything seems to be working ok except the print spooler has been having problems locking up.  First the print spooler would turn off and not turn back on, and the processor would get pegged at 100% until the spoolsv service was turned off in task manager.  This was fixed by following MSKB 324757 and removing the printer drivers from the c drive and the registry, which then allowed us to reinstall the printer (HP LJ1022-usb) fresh and it worked fine and stuff stopped locking up.  Then the problem resurfaced when a pdf file that is scanned and emailed to the user, is opened and when they try to print it from Adobe Reader 9.2, it locks everything up, the spooler stops, and it never prints and the process from above is the only way to get the printer working again for anything.  I have run a repair on Adobe Reader, also tried saving the pdf's from the email to the dekstop and then printing them, with the same results, and made sure everything in Office 2007 is set to run all from my computer in add/remove programs.  There is no MS document imaging writer showing up under printers, just the one local printer after we remove it and reinstall it, not sure if that is an issue or not.  Any ideas? thanks,

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Asked On
2009-11-06 at 07:39:22ID24878159
Tags

Adobe

,

pdf

,

printing

Topics

Adobe Acrobat

,

Printers by HP

Participating Experts
1
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: IndyNCCPosted on 2009-11-06 at 08:06:56ID: 25760323

Also it only seems to do this on pdfs that are sent as email attachments to the user, they can open them fine, but if they try to print them it looks like it starts to process the print, then hangs and the printer locks up.  It does this if they try to print from both the attachment or if they save the pdf locally and then try to print it, same result.  However they can print a pdf that is already saved on their machine just fine opening it with reader the same way, doesn't make much sense.

 

by: AdamRobinsonPosted on 2009-11-06 at 08:08:12ID: 25760339

IIRC, this was a problem that began after Service Pack 3 for a good deal of HP Printers, and was due to the driver not functioning with the recent service pack properly.  The 1022 was definitely affected.  You want want to search the HP forums (specifically on the 1022s) about the issue.

Outside of that, for what it's worth, this is a very common problem with Adobe PDF products, and is a reason many people have begun using FoxIt, which does not suffer the same issues.

 

by: AdamRobinsonPosted on 2009-11-06 at 08:08:54ID: 25760355

If they wait long enough does it eventually print?  Adobe appears to "freeze" when it's downloading a file, which must be completed before it prints entirely.

 

by: IndyNCCPosted on 2009-11-06 at 08:13:33ID: 25760401

No it never prints, and then no other print jobs will run after that unless the printer is removed through the registry and reinstalled.  It prints pdfs that were already on the machine just fine but does not like ones that were sent from somewhere else.

 

by: AdamRobinsonPosted on 2009-11-06 at 08:17:51ID: 25760448

Ok, then my original comment applies.  

Do you have a non-HP printer to try printing to?

 

by: IndyNCCPosted on 2009-11-06 at 08:37:03ID: 25760628

Not at the moment, I may have found it, it looks like if I go to print the pdf that has been the problem, and I go to print, then the advanced button down at the bottom in the Adobe Reader print screen, then I checked the "print as an image" box and it looks like it goes through now.  I was dialed in so I'm waiting for the user to get back to test it for sure, but when I printed the same document after that it went through and the printer did not hang and I can print again, which was not the case before so that may have done it.  Probably has something to do with the size of the scanned pdf being real big if that is the fix.

 

by: IndyNCCPosted on 2009-11-09 at 13:56:00ID: 31651059

The print as image setting in the Adobe Reader print menu-advanced had to be turned on for it to print out a pdf that was scanned and sent from email, probably due to the size, turning on the print as image setting has fixed it.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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