Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of DaveQuance
DaveQuanceFlag for United States of America

asked on

Print Spooler 2008 R2 (Informational to manual, stopped, auto, started randomly)

I have a 2008 R2 RDP server that is fully updated. The print spooler, at seemingly random intervals between 1-3 hours, will log the following informational 7036/7040 entries in the system log in this order:

The start type of the Print Spooler service was changed from auto start to demand start.
The Print Spooler service entered the stopped state.
The start type of the Print Spooler service was changed from demand start to auto start.
The Print Spooler service entered the running state.

This starts and completes in less than one second. I'm fairly certain their is no malware. I have already removed *all* printers but the XPS printer, all non-default HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print driver, monitor, and print processor entries. I restarted the print spooler and the problem still occurred.

I'm trying to figure out how to identify what is changing, stopping, changing, and starting this. I thought maybe procmon but that would be a lot of info to search through and odds are whatever is doing it is triggering a Windows related method to change it (maybe not though. Thoughts?

Note: This is a significant issue because upon the print spooler restarting all redirected printers are offline.
Avatar of Coffinated
Coffinated

I have seen similar behavior when a user printed one particular page using MSIE. That only happened on Windows7-64bit system. Can you check the print queue for any stuck jobs after it restarts?
Avatar of DaveQuance

ASKER

No stuck print jobs. Also, looking at past logs this issue has been occurring long before anyone was printing at all (as I was the only one using it then and didn't even have printer redirection on). I didn't notice it until those with redirected printers were on (it's in testing, not production, so this isn't a dire situation or anything but I do need to get it resolved).

I set this server up sometime in early December and due to other responsibilities didn't really get any users on it until January.
I would also remove all printer drivers from the hard drive, update to the latest drivers again (overwrite existing files if not removed). Also I would try another drivers, either different versions or generic versions for your printer. For example if the printer model is AB4200 you may want to use drivers for AB4000 line.

Another option is to use "diagnose and fix printer problem tool" from Microsoft.
http://support.microsoft.com/mats/printing_problems/

It may suggest to isolate printer if not you can follow this guide
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2009/10/08/windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-print-driver-isolation.aspx
Here's the fun part, I already took a snapshot of the server, deleted all printers (except the Microsoft XPS printer), went into HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print and deleted all non-default print drivers, print monitors, and print processors. The problem still occurred.

And it's not throwing any errors or warnings. It's like something is intentionally changing the service to manual, stopping the service, changing it back to automatic, and then starting it.

What I'm trying to do is determine what is making such changes. I was thinking of doing procmon and monitoring the spooler exe and the registry key for the service startup method. I've been procrastinating because I think that even if something was doing it intentionally it's probably calling on Windows processes or something to change it... so it would show those processes instead of the root thing doing it. I'm going to quit procrastinating and start a procmon now though.
See if there is time pattern, the spooler may be stopping every 15 minutes or so. If you can predict the next crash your logs will be significantly smaller.
It's not consistent, seems to occur every 1-3 hours.
I instead decided to just setup a fresh VM and add things slowly to see what's causing it. I foolishly installed more than I should have from the start (thinking it was unlikely to be these things) and the problem is already occurring. I'm removing some to see if the issue goes away, we'll see. Currently installed items are in the attached screenshot. In addition, it has the RDP Session Host role, RDP Web Access (and IIS dependencies), .Net 3.5.1 (for EasyPrint), the audio/video/desktop composition requirements, NLB, and SNMP.
SOLUTION
Avatar of Coffinated
Coffinated

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Upon your suggestion I re-visited an idea about the group policy. Seems the new server since the clear has the issue *exactly* during group policy refreshes. I was even able to re-produce it on the original and new with a gpupdate /force (which I would have sworn I already tried but that's what I get for not checking off things I've tried in writing).

Oddly though, the issue should have been VERY consistent before since the group policies refresh on regular intervals. In any event, I'm thankful I have a real starting point now.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
That's odd, but at least you can disable each group policy at a time, do gpupdate /force and hopefully find it.
Coffinated, thank you for having me re-visit the idea that helped me to find the cause.