Mysteriously Disappearing Printers

[MountainNetworks]

Hi:

Just a sanity check. Over the past couple of days, 3 of my clients tell me that all of a sudden their printers aren't there. Windows 2000 and XP are the OSes in general.

Clients come in, they can't print. They check and they don't have any printers installed. Reboot and they're all back. Very strange. Except this one case where all of a sudden the installed printer was gone, and rebooting didn't fix it.

Is there some new virus? Has anyone else experienced this as of late?

Thanks....

 

[jrbarnett]

Have you tried starting the print spooler service? This sometimes makes network printers magically reappear.

John

 

[MountainNetworks]

Doesn't rebooting the computer do that? Of course, it restarts all of the other services too

 

[bcastner]

I think John's point is that the spooler service is stopping.

Start, run, net start spooler

Restarting the machine of course restarts services. The above command line restarts the spooler (if it is willing).

You want to diagnose the reasons for the spooler service failure. As a practical matter, in my experience it is almost always that the print drivers for the printer server are incomplete, or erronous.

You can restart the spooler service but a repeat of the call to the wrong driver stops the service again.

Usually a good cleaning of the drivers from the machine, and reinstallation (with newer drivers if available) will resolve the issue. See, for an excellent discussion of this issue and a guide to resolving it,

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/CleanPrinterDrivers.htm

 

[hdingman]

A "gotcha" on 2K and XP - multiple users are always enabled, and network resource connections are made on a per-user basis. Also, a userid on the local machine is not the same as the userid in a domain, even though the username is the same. "Localmachine\JohnDoe" is different than "Domain1\JohnDoe" and so on. Each gets its own complete set of desktop, start menus, data areas, and everything else.

It's a pain, but each user must add network printers, or it must be set up in the connection profile. I wonder if a new userid is logging on to the station, or if they logged on to the local machine instead of the domain. When the original user reboots and signs back on, everything comes back. Anything installed by the second user goes away.

I think that sounds like your symptoms.

hd

 

[MountainNetworks]

Good call,but nope All users login to their local machines. They don't have domain accounts set up, per se.

The Windows 2000 Server was also affected. In fact, all workstations connect to printers which are being shared out by the server. Both printers are usb printers connected directly to the server device. Wasn't my choice to set them up like that. I inherited this problem. So it appeared that someone had manually deleted the printers from the server. But when I rebooted the server, the printers reappeared.

Anyway, I should say this problem has gone away. I'm just at a loss to figure out what happened. It really was a simple as they got up, walked away, came back the next morning and the printers were gone.