Print Spooler Locks Window s Explorer

[feetdontfailme]

I have a strange problem that I do not know how to fix. Within the past three months or so, when I log on to our windows 2003 R2 server the explorer seems to be locked up. The taskbar is black and neither the start button nor ctrl-E will yield an explorer window. If I open the task manager and kill the spoolsv, the explorer immediately releases. This server is used as an application server, with users remote desktopping in to use the application housed on it. Because of how bad terminal services is with printers, many printer drivers are installed on this machine for the several locations that access it. I am betting that the culprit is the most recently installed printers from HP, but it is not an option to simply delete these printers and not re-add them(can you say user complaints?). On an XP desktop I had to edit the registry so that that user would not have to wait ten or fifteen minutes to access her machine when it was started up, but that same registry entry does not solve the problem. Any ideas? I thank you in advance for your time and your responses.

 

[Redfox1]

Oh, I've been there too. Not fun.

HP & lexmark port monitors are NOTORIOUS for causing hang-ups.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947477

Is the drive where the spool files are kept full? (just checking).

Do you clear your spool folder? We regularly delete user's temp & IE temp folders - USE ICSweep from

http://www.ctrl-alt-del.com.au/CAD_TSUtils.htm

to accomplish that.
Stop spooler service; Stop tcp-ip printing service (aka LPD)
Stop any Lexmark/HP printing based services
clear the spooler folder UNLESS you have any print queues set to keep printed documents - you might have to warn users about that.
Restart them in reverse order

I've also had experienced this on XP Pro's where the HP/Lexmark port monitors cause a race condition with the spooler & subsequently the server service (which will cause explorer to hang at times too.)

If all else fails, create NEW queues and switch to HP/Lexmark/Canon/etc Universal drivers - haven't had any problems with our since we've done that. Just do NOT change drivers on an existing queue with HP Universal print drivers, you'll be very sorry! The HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\DevModes2 structure changed and it causes certain "minor" settings to be miss read by user's settings...

PS: we manage 180 Print queues.