Print Spooler service stops unexpectedly

[TheRaidersRock]

Hello! We have been having a strange issue with our Windows NT print server: the help
desk gets flooded with calls from people who can't print, so we log on to
the server and find that the spooler service has stopped unexpectedly. We
get the following error message in the event viewer: Source: Service Control
Manager
Event ID: 7031

The Print Spooler service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1
time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000
milliseconds: Restart the service.

It appears to log about 5 more print jobs and then another error message
stating that it could not successfully restart the service. We can go in and
manually restart the service and it works just fine again- for a little
while. It's happening now more and more frequently- several times a day- and
is becoming a very serious issue. We've checked the event logs to see if any
printer in particular seems to be causing the issue- but there really
doesn't seem to be much in common between the printers that were being used
just before the service hung. Does anyone have any ideas?
Thank you!
RaiderFan

 

[dk87]

We had a similar thing happen on an NT4 Terminal Server, except rather than just stopping the print spooler it would blue screen and kill EVERYTHING. Checked the event logs and everything else, nothing. It drove me nuts for three days. One of our users was very upset and emailed EVERYONE in the company about her displeasure, so in an attempt to appease her I was monitoring her activities closely. Ends up that the server bombed out EVERY TIME she attempted to print to one certain printer. If she didn't print to that printer, the server would not bomb out. I waited until everyone went home then printed a test page to that printer and BSOD. Rebooted, removed the driver, re-installed and all was OK. Strange how a printer driver can corrupt like that.

 

[TheRaidersRock]

Thank you for your response! It's funny that you should mention a corrupted driver- as it turns out, we recently discovered the exact same culprit. It took a little while to narrow down exactly which one it was, but once we replaced it everything started working just fine again.

Thanks again ,
RaiderFan