Can't Print Remote Desktop XP/2003 Server

[BluePoet]

Hello,

We have Windows 2003 server. As of the past 2 days we have not been able to print from a remote desktop. The problem seemed to take into effect when 2 days ago our server lost all of its fonts. Can't explain as to why. We replaced the fonts, all seems to be normal until we tried to print from a remote desktop connection and we cant print for the likes of it. Shows the document go into the print que but then it says failed and wont go past that point. I am thinking that there have to be a service that maybe hasn't started on the server or there is another file missing that we need to re-install. If anyone has any suggestions, would love to hear from you.

 

[PPettit]

Have you tried restarting the Print Spooler service?

 

[BluePoet]

Yup - tried to restart the Print Spooler Service but didnt change anything. Any printers installed locally to the server work fine but nothing works if you go in via Remote Desktop.

 

[RITE1]

I don’t have much experience with straight 2003 server but we use SBS 2003 all the time.

We had some printing problems and found our answers in Server Management > Monitoring and Reporting > Critical Errors in System Log

Hope that helps.

Rick

 

[BluePoet]

Checked the event log - didn't give any clues as to what was causing the issue.

 

[PPettit]

I'm just curious... What is your set up?

Are you trying to print from auto-created printers (created whent he user logs in) or static printers (created on the server before the user ever logs in)?

Are all three parts (PC, printer, and server) on the same physical network or do the PC and printer communicate with the server from across a WAN connection?

The majority of my desktops and printers are located at remote offices and printing is a big pain. Currently, I have to create a static printer on the server and then redirect its port (LPT1) to use the same one as their auto-created local printer (TS0xx). Every now and then the redirection process doesn't work just right and the printer driver ends up connecting to a port that doesn't have a physical printer on the other end. This causes a problem similar to what you described. What I'm getting at is, are you sure that you're printing to valid printer port?