Deploy Printers in Server 2008 R2

You may need to install Client Side Extensions on the XP computers, Have you also set the targeting options in the GPO?

I bet you will find that the Visat and newer clients are working properly. You will need pushprinters.exe for the XP clients. Set up your GPO's so that the pushprinters.exe is only applied once per computer otherwise you may experience long log in times.
Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided not not include pushprinters.exe in 2K8 R2. Their are two versions of pushprinter.exe, x64 and x86. You will need to copy the appropriate version for your clients from a W2K3 R2 box.
The other option is to use Group Policy Prefferences to deploy your printers. This will work with XP and newer clients without pushprinters.exe but I have experienced issue with this method such as long log in times and have reverted back to the Printer Manger method.
 

I have installed the CSE on this machine, the test Drive mapping I created started working after I installed CSE. I am not sure what you mean by set the targeting options in GPO. I have created a test group and OU, I placed my account in that group and OU.

So far as I can tell the printers are not working on Vista or Win7 or Server 2008. When I log into other machines these printers do not show. We do not have any Windows 2003 R2 32bit servers. I have the OS disk but only finding the pushprintersconnections.ex_ file

We use Scripts currently to push the printers to users from our old setup of Server 2000 and Server 2003. This is the first DC and Print server running 64bit.

On another note I forgot to mention. One of my main systems is a Server 2008 R2. When I open GPO I can see Deployed Printers in the Policy. If I remote into any of the 3 actual DC's they will not show the Deployed Printers in the Policy. It is not a issue of replication. I can change domain controller on my system to any of the 3 DC's and see Deployed printers just fine. But when I remote to that machien it does not show it. Very stange.

That is normal behavior. The printing deployment is not very well thought out by MS. If you look at GPMC in an older DC (2003) it will not show up in GPMC.
Here is the x86 version of pushprinters from a x86 W2k3R2 server.
I have had better luck with a computer based policy on this one. So remember it has to be a start up script for computer policy and a logon script for user policy.

pushprinterconnections.zip

I have pushed the PPC.exe to my XP system with no success. All the servers are 2008 R2 I am testing with. The 3 DC's are Server 2008R2, my server is 2008 R2 and same thing with a Co-worker has Server 2008 R2. My server and his server both see Deployed Printers in the GPO just fine. The 3 2008 R2 DC's will not see the Deployed Printers.

I copied the PPC.exe to the sysvol through startup scripts and hit add, selected the ppc.exe file and applied it to the GPO. I have moved my XP machines to the OU and added it to the group affected by the policy. 3 gpupdate /force with reboots and still no go. I do see the ppc.exe in the prefetch folder now added on todays date. So the ppc.exe did get pushed but the printers will not install. I have verified there are x86 drivers on the print server. I can manually install the printers on a XP machine with no errors.

Another update to the system. I have built a Windows 7 64bit VM and added to the domain. I put the PC in the same OU and applied the policy to this machine. It as well is not pulling the printers.

Okay, lets look at the Print Management MMC. First create a GPO called "Deploy Printers" on the Windows XP computer OU. Set the ppp.exe as a startup script. Open Print Management on your print server. Select printers. Right click on a printer and select "Deploy with Group Policy". Select the OU that you just created and add it as a computer policy.
gpupdate /force
Then reboot and login.

This has worked by pushing to computer only. I do wonder why this will not push to users though. Pushing to computers is going to make things much more difficult. Do you know of a way to correct this?

Yes, you can push to users but it will be difficult. The ppc.exe needs to be x86 for x86 computers and x64 with x64 computers (Thats wat the documentation says. I have not tested that. You may be able to use the x86 version for both, but definately not the other way around). I can send you the x64 version if you need it.
If you want to make it work with users you need to make a couple of changes.
- Attach GPO to user OU.
- Add ppc.exe to logon script in User Policy instead of startup script
- Select user policy when adding deployed printer through Print manager.

I have followed your instructions for user push and it fails. I have attached the error I receive on the XP machine. I do not receive this error if I use a startup script, only on the logon script. I believe once I can resolve this logon script everything should work fine, because everything seems to be trying to work now where before we started I was getting no where.

Windows 7 is now getting the printer from the Per User GPO
error.JPG

Last issue I am seeing is that once those printers were installed on XP from the computer policy there is no way to delete them. I have disabled the policy, moved the PC from the Group and OU. I have also removed the pc from the domain and they will still come back. Pretty strange they wont stay away now. The windows 7 system dropped the printers with no problem.

Thank you very much for all of your assistance. This has been a huge help. I will stick to script printer distribution until we phase out XP all together.