Printer issue

[metguru]

Recently I've been having an issue with getting documents to print. I've tried reinstalling drivers, restarting the computer, and restarting the print spool service. It seems that the print spooler service won't stay running, and any time I try to do something dealing with the printers the service seems to stop. This issue is in Windows 7, 32bit. Any help would be appreciated.

[SnugglesTheBear]

Can you give me an error message to go on? Check the logs via the event viewer and see if you can find some more information there. Also, if your computer isn't a custom job, then preloaded software from the manufacturer might be causing conflicts. Anywho, post more and I will see if I can help.

Cheers

[metguru]

This is the event viewer error/warning

It doesn't have much information, but maybe you can see something I can't. I'm in the process of moving to a new house so I may not be able to reproduce the error message for a day or two.

 [ Name]  Service Control Manager 
   [ Guid]  {555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4} 
   [ EventSourceName]  Service Control Manager 
 
  - EventID 7034 

   [ Qualifiers]  49152 
 
   Version 0 
 
   Level 2 
 
   Task 0 
 
   Opcode 0 
 
   Keywords 0x8080000000000000 
 
  - TimeCreated 

   [ SystemTime]  2010-06-17T18:40:32.934019100Z 
 
   EventRecordID 1058060 
 
   Correlation 
 
  - Execution 

   [ ProcessID]  660 
   [ ThreadID]  2920 
 
   Channel System 
 
   Computer *****
 
   Security 
 

- EventData 

  param1 Print Spooler 
  param2 2

[metguru]

Now when I try to add a new printer it says the print spool service is not running. So I restart it an try to add a new printer and the same thing comes up. Something must stopping the service, or there must be something wrong with it. Thats all I can think of. Any ideas? Anyone? I hate to be defeated by these things. I just refuse to reformat to fix this.

[steve.milner]

Have you tried manually starting the service to see what happens?

This might help you understand more.

Regards,

Steve

[SnugglesTheBear]

It would appear from the Event log that your printer spool is terminating unexpectedly, but you already knew that >.<
http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?e...ontrol+Manager

The only reason why I could see this continually happening would be that there exists a misconfiguration somewhere on you system. Some more events that happen right before the event of the spool crashing would be of great help. It might be trying to dial out to a service that isn't running causing a crash, but I still need more information. So, I guess more events would be a good starting point? Should be events right before the crash if my hunch is correct.

[metguru]

Have you tried manually starting the service to see what happens?

This might help you understand more.

Regards,

Steve

Yes, that was what I was doing. I stopped the service manually. Then I started it manually.

I went into the registry and just started deleting stuff. I previously tried uninstalling printer drivers to no avail. But it seems they weren't completely removed. Data was still in the registry that I'm hoping was causing the issue. Print spooler seems to be more stable now. I printed a test page and it actually successfully worked. So I guess we'll see as to whether that was the issue. I'll keep you guys updated if I have any more problems.

[SnugglesTheBear]

yeah, the registry gets mucked up very quickly if you aren't constantly protecting it. I am curious to what registry keys you deleted though....

[SnugglesTheBear]

also, on a note of the registry. Does anyone know any good freely available registry cleaners? The ones I used before I switched to unix are no longer out there >.<

[metguru]

I use a combo of CCleaner and Free Registry Defrag. naturally, the first is to clean it out, and the second is to defrag it. Not really sure how much the defrag does, but it hasn't seemed to hurt anything.

Obviously these didn't delete any entries dealing with the printer drivers. I'll look and see if I can find the ones I deleted. I will admit, it was somewhat haphazardly haha.