All of a sudden "Print Subsystem Unavailable"

[dfelix121]

Whats this, why is it happening, and how do i fix it.
It's happened to two win2k computers that are hooked up to a peer to peer tcp/ip network with 50 computers on it.
There were no qualifying factors that caused this from what i can tell (or so i was told), and i am stuck. ANY info would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks
Dave

 

[tlcscousin]

Try from command prompt net start spooler
I have seen this before, and never did figure out which application I installed had caused it, I had it narrowed down to an add on to excel. I ended up with a reinstall of everything from scratch and did not install the extra candy to excel(sound files) You can in the spooler service set it to restart spooler on the first error.

 

[anticore]

I had this on two user machines and found that deleting their roaming profile (and of course building a new one on login) and a full system restart fixed the problem.
From that point on the problem did not occur again...

 

[dfelix121]

Okay... this is going to sound stupid.... what is a "roaming profile"?

 

[DigitalRolly]

Roaming profile is a profile (Desktops icons and stuff) that follows you from workstation to workstation... but if you don't know what it is... it's prolly not ur problem

I had the same thing with the print spooler service freezing... I initially had it set to restart everytime it stopped (in services), but after I installed SP2 the problem stopped...

An M$ feature...

 

[anticore]

Both of my users's workstations had sp2 installed when the problem occured!! Just to let you guys know...

 

[dfelix121]

Okay.... so whats the fix?

 

[dfelix121]

Got it.... The printer i was using simultaneously installed a DOS driver..... the error was occuring when a user tried to print form the DOS driver... and wouoldn't fix itself..

I had to restart the spooler, which brought the print system up, quickly re-set the default printer to the non-DOS one, and delete the DOS print driver. I had to do it quickly because the spooler crashes pretty quickly if i leave it on the DOS driver..

Thanks for all the input!!

 

[Guest_imported]

I had this problem several times. It consistantly happened whenever I installed Bitware Fax. I had to uninstall the application & remove all registries using regedit. Once this was done, the printer reappeared automatically!
Other applications may give rise to similar problems.
I have Win2K Professional SP2 & Office 2000.

Deepak