Citrix Printing Problem - Print Spooler Service Stops on Servers

[PWD]

We have 7 Citrix servers and I have 40+ Policies for printers around the country. Last week I added a new printer driver (by installing the printer on our first citrix server and then deleting it again) and then selected it and replicated across the rest of our citrix servers. Since then we have had almost all of our citrix servers stopping their print spooler services all by themselves and those users logged on to that server losing their printers until I restart the service. There's no pattern to the stopping and it doesn't seems to have affected one of our servers - although I've not documented it so I can't be 100% certain. BTW I think it was the driver for a Canon C2570 that seems to have been the problem. However, I can't remove that driver from all the servers and even those from which I've removed it still stop. Has anyone any ideas?

Many thanks, Des.

 

[zeland]

In my experience, this is definitely a printer driver problem. I had a whale of a time figuring out why all of my customers started to have their print spoolers die on them all of a sudden.

I later found out that HP was having a sale on their laser printers, namely the LaserJet 1010/1015/1020. All of my customers bought loads of these cheap printers to replace their existing aging DM/BJ printers. Every time a user were to hit the print button with one of the above listed printers, the spooler would die instantly. A call to HP reveled that these printer are not supported on TS/Citrix and no updates/patches will be released. I had to get management do a staff sale to get rid of those printers. From there on, all my customers were advised that before buying any printer to get a lone unit from their respective vendors to do a test first. If it works, buy it. If not, send it back.

I do wish that there is a TS/Citrix compatibility list of printer that we could piece together.

--== Anything can go wrong. It's just a matter of how far wrong it will go till people think its right. ==--

 

[PWD]

Thanks. I agree that printers are involved somewhere in the equation but, until this morning!!, I'd had three trouble-free days with none of my citrix servers stopping their services. What I had found is that a user logging on could trigger the services to stop, so I had more troubles in the early part of the day when people came in to work. I added Canon iR5870C drivers yesterday afternoon so I'm still suspicious of that brand. We have quite a few HP1022n printers and they dont seem to be the root cause.

Des.

 

[KarenBRMO]

We have added a HP 1022 and it is stopping the spooler on one computer, but we are trying to access the printer through another one. The printer prints fine on the host computer and one other computer. It stops the spooler every time we restart it. Any ideas??

 

[ChelseaGirl]

There is a list for HP printers.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00203537

I'd just stick to a few as drivers as possble being installed and map everything to them. Unless you are going to use fancy features on a printer, a standard one should work fine.

 

[PWD]

Thanks. But I don't think it's HP that's given us grief - just can't tell really. I'm told that we upgraded to Citrix Presentation Server V4.0 (from whatever) with the policies in place and this may have given us 'issues'.

It would also be nice to know how to remove printers that no longer exist on any server or within any policy from users' "Printers & Faxes"; the only way I've found is editing the registry of the server that the user is logged on to at that particular time. Otherwise that setting gets re-written back to their profile; it's as if their Policy will add any printers it contains but doesn't wipe out all other printers before doing so. Anyway, we seem to be stabalising after a lot of regediting!

 

[twoody54]

We ONLY use native drivers to server 2003. If it's not there, we don't install it. First we map all the printer drivers to something else if we can find a compatible native driver... ie hp color laser 5500 to a 4500. If we don't find one that way, We use the Citrix Universal Printer and the Citrix Universal Printer driver to print to unknown printers. We have had far fewer printing problems since going this route.

 

[hanoirocks]

I've found the few HP1020 printers I have are hit and miss with Citrix. They've worked with a particular driver version, and then won't with another.

The HP1012 which looks almost the same as the 1020,1010 was perfectly compatible with Citrix. I don't know why HP changed the design of it.