Printer goes offline all time 1

[jreyes90]

I work for a company with WinNT servers and Win98 workstations. We have HP LaserJet printers (4000,4050,4100,8000)wich are shared in the network by the WinNT server. The problem is...printers go constantly offline and users are not able to print. Users right click the printer and try to put it online 2 or 3 times and then sometimes print but sometimes they need to reboot their PC. We´ve reinstalled the server several times and PC´s too, we changed drivers and checked antivirus software but the problem goes on. Document sometimes appear in NT spooler as Remote Downlebvel Document with size 0 bytes. It´s very important to say that this problem started to happen without doing any special change in our network, it just suddenly began happening.
Any suggestions ????? Thanks a lot !!

 

[chcotreeast]

On the systems that have Win98 on them, go to the spool folder and delete all files in there with a .spl and .shd extension. I had this same problem on our NT 4.0 network. When a printer gets alot of jobs sent to it, these files build up in there and they will not allow to print to it cause it will give you offline errors and other error messages. It worked for me!! God bless!!

 

[chcotreeast]

Delete the .spl and .shd files on your NT Server spool folder too!!

 

[jreyes90]

Hi! I checked for the existence of .spl and .shm files in the Win98 clients and NT4.0 server too but I didn´t find any of them. Where do they should appear ? Hope you can further help me !!!!

 

[chcotreeast]

They would appear something like this: 0000013.shd or 0000023.spl If you find them, delete them, then I would delete the printers and reinstall them.
Also, have you checked the share rights of each one of these users? Have they accidently changed anything? You might want to check on HP's website to get the lastest drivers for these printers too.