Print Spooler Service Will Not Stay Running

[DrB0b]

Gentlemen and ladies,

Have a W7 box that functions normally except for the Print Spooler stops working either if you try and print something, check the properties of a printer, or just after a certain length of time. I have ran Rkill, Tdsskiller, CCleaner, Spybot, MSE, and MBAM. MBAM was the only one to find two PDFdownloadreader(or something similar) "malware" which I know wasnt a program I installed. Subsequent scans do not show anything else on the PC but it still has the same issue. Dont see anything funky in the dependencies of the Print Spooler. Have ran an sfc /scannow which came back with no issues either.

Any ideas on where to head now or what is stopping this service? I would hate to do a Windows Repair as it would take up a lot of time and still might not solve this if something is living there causing this issue.

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[DrB0b]

I was a bit hasty, as Spybot did pick up a CoolPDFReaderinstaller.Ink(or something similar). Best I can tell this is the same "program" MBAM found but in a different location, this one being on the desktop. All research points to this being a legit program though.

After going to C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS and deleting all the files inside and allowing a new one to be created upon each print job, it seems to have alleviated the problem. Not sure if this is just a stop gap or the real underlying issue. I will report back if other issues arise.

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[goombawaho]

When all else fails, uninstall anti-virus and run Combofix as a last opinion on being "clean".