Print Spooler Crashing

[tbinkley]

Currently we five (5) MS Windows 2000 servers with Citrix Metaframe XPa installed on them. The problem we are having is our print spooler keeps crashing.

When users login via Citrix ICA client (just like TS) the Citrix Management Consol maps the users default printer and creates a virtual printer under Windows 2000 server with the driver for that printer. But when the user logs out of Citrix the printer is suppose to disappear as well; however, sometimes this doesn’t happen. The user will log out but the printer stays behind. So when the user goes to login next time it can’t map their default printer because it is already there. This causes the print spooler to crash.

Even If I reboot the server those printers won’t disappear, I have to literally go into printers and faxes and delete each of them and reboot again. Why is this occurring and how can I stop it?

Note: We have standardized our printers to HP 2100, 2200 and 2300 LaserJets and these drivers are installed on the server as well so it can map the proper driver with the proper virtual printer.


Thanks

 

[criticalUpdate]

when you say virtual printer do you mean UPD -the process depending on version that maps a black and white printer to an HPLJ4 driver and the color to a HP4050 I believe?

Are you sure that there are no rogue printers out there, using bad drivers? If you can identify those bad old drivers that might be causing problems then go to "server properties" in the printers windows and remove....

Additional note...
The printers you mentioned are supported by both HP and Citrix in a TSE environment using either the Host Based, PCL or PS versions of the drivers.

Jeff

 

[tbinkley]

No not UDP, each of the printer drivers are installed locally on the server and also on the pc. Under the Citrix Management Console it lets the administrator add different print drivers depending on the printers that are being used in the field. We have it setup that when a user logs into the system with an HP LaserJet 2200 the CMC understands that and it uses the HP LaserJet 2200 driver installed on the server. The print drivers have to be exact on the pc as they are on the server for this to work.

Note 1: the exact driver is installed on the server as it is on the pc, we always use the PCL 5e driver.

Note 2: It could be a rogue printer; however, I don't think so due to the fact that the print spooler only crashes on two out of five metaframe servers and our servers load balance. This leads me to believe that there are problems with the two servers.

 

[salsero328]

1st I would check the Citrix web site for the latest service
pack for printing.
2nd If 3 servers are working correctly, you can try to reinstall the drivers on the servers that are having problems or replicate the drivers from a known good server to one of the servers that is having the print spooler crashing issue.