HP Printer disappearing from Windows 2000

[brandonphipps]

I have a user who looses her networked printer mappings. The first time it happened Windows 2000 would not let me create a new printer, I had to restart her Print Spool Service but not the RPC service. After restarting the service the printer showed up again. I then deleted the printer and reinstalled it. It continues to lose her printer mappings and rebooting the machine dosen't help. I have to stop and restart the Print Spool service for the printers to show back up. The problem is not specific to just one printer, ie. the machine drops all networked printers. The OS is Windows 2000, running Novel client 4.81. She appears to be the only one having this problem.

 

[rjbj]

This might be the solution to your problem.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;319496

 

[cburrows]

While rjbj's suggestion might fix your problem, I can comment that we have had the same symptom, with no luck. In our case, this problem randomly and sporadically occurs to different users each time. Of approximately 200 users, this will happen to 2 or 3 different ones, once every 4 to 6 months. Since the Novell 3.12 connection is used by only a few of our users, it cannot be considered a constant variable.

In every case, however, having the user power-cycle the PC returns everything to normal. I have not had to restart the spooler. So it definitely seems to be a client issue of some kind. We do have JetDirect cards in many of our HP printers...perhaps both of us should be looking to HP, instead of Microsoft or Novell?

 

[rjbj]

I don't know if you are using Web JetAdmin but this solution in HP's knowledgebase may point you in the right direction.

http://h200002.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=bpj06954&locale=en_US

 

[brandonphipps]

Thank you to every one who responded. Unfortunately, as is many times the case, I was not receiving all the facts related to this case. Apparently, restarting the Print Spool Service and deleting and re-creating the printers solved the major part of the problem. When the user was reporting that her printer was still "disappearing" to the help desk, what was actually the problem was that occasionally her printer would print about half a page of her document. I believe this problem was solved by going into the printers properties and telling it to spool the entire document before printing. I am not exactly certain that this is the best fix, but apparently it is working so far.