Printer Problems from HELL!!!

Ok guys, I'm having one of those days where I feel like crap, all the wierd problems are happening, and I'm quickly turning homicidal. For the love of all that is pure and good, throw me some advice before something gets KILLED!

Ok, thing is my major weakness is printers. I hate working on printer problems more than anything else, mostly because it seems printers stop working for nonexplainable mysterious reasons more than any other piece of hardware (anyone else experience this phenomenon, or is it just me?). So of course, since that's what I hate most, that's the problem we have most often. I really wish I could get my hands on that Murphy guy.

Ok, so one of the employess calls me up wanting printer help. All employees usually work through a terminal server since it's pretty much SOP, but he has something special that requires him printing from the local machine. Ok, should be simple. He needs color, we have two color printers. He has drivers for both on his machine. Both printers show up as "ready" status in the printers directory. Configurations for both are correct. Neither one prints! Why? It dosen't say! You just get a generic print error, and that's the end of that.

So I get fed up and decide to screw it all and just share my printer down here in my office with him since I have a color one. Mine's shared with other computers no prob, so search for it from his computer, find it, set it to the printers directory, go to print, and -- "Access denied"!

And somewhere, I can here vallainous laughing from deep within the computer...

So, as some of you know, espeically Tiger Shark, I've had outright bizarre network (particularly AD) issues to resolve over the past year or so, and I'm wondering if this isn't cropping up again. So I check Active Directory to see if there's an IP conflict causing the failure in communication between his box and my printer -- nope. IP addresses are as they should be evidently.

So, I'm completely baffled here. Anyone brave enough to tackle advising me on this one?

Ain't real big on printers here either, but I remember that there's a 'default printer' selection in the printers option in control panel - you might make sure the right printer is selected in it...

Depending on the OS...have the user stop the Print spooler service..and restart.
This will clear the que on the WS. (and save you from having to reboot the WS)...I have seen print jobs get stuck..and then nothing else prints

You may need to turn off the printer to clear its memory also. Can you look into the printers que...

What kind of document is it..cause I have seen some funky stuff with PDFs ...had to use a Post Script driver to properly print.

Also some funky stuff with excel spreadsheets where the user needs to save the document (without any changes) if it was created on another WS (different default printer).

Just some print tips from my print hell days :) ....mostly NT +

HTHs
MLF