[chrislyork]

I found this threat on the site and I am having the exact same problem with client PC's at the credit union where I work. Does anybody have any ideas on a fix?

"I'm a client support technician at a hospital with 3000+ PC's, 90+ % of them being Windows XP... the other techs and I have had this problem for months now where random computers will lose the default printer checkmark (no printer has the checkmark) and users cannot set a default printer nor print, unless the techs reset the print spooler service or re-install a printer (which in effect resets the print spooler service anyway). This seems to be independent of hardware or specific software or whether or not it is an autologin profile. Several of us have spent hours on Google trying to find anyone who has a similar situation, but to no avail... the closest we have come is to seeing that it is possible that, if the profile is sufficiently large, the profile is still loading when the print spooler tries to start but, since the profile is still loading, the service never starts... we have looked at a couple machines that this has happened on and the profile in question was indeed large (>500MB), but I have just seen the same issue on a machine where the associated profile was relatively small (<80MB). We know it is not a computer-specific issue because given one PC, one user will have the problem, but another user logs in and the problem isn't there.

Out of 4000 or so PCs, this has only happened on about 25-30 in our environment... "

[ozziebeanie]

I am presuming the drivers are on the server, for these printers, is that correct? and that the profiles you talk about are on a server?

Permisions? Did you check the Profiles? Just reading what you wrote at this stage I am coming up in my mind with more questions.

Once you have corrected it on a particular ID has it happend again on that same ID? Or just a different ID the next time?

[chrislyork]

Yes, the drivers are on the server. The profiles are also on the server.

There haven't been any permission changes for anyone in a few months for any of the server resources (including printers).

I also have been unable to "correct" the problem as the other thread creator did.

We did attempt to alter the settings for the network adapter so that the PC couldn't turn it off in order to save power (which is another fix I found searching around) but that didn't solve the issue.

[ScrabbleVoice]

Update from me (the originator of this thread): The issue is becoming more widespread... the printers are a mix of network-installed and local-installed, profiles are stored locally on the workstations. I am currently attempting to work with a Microsoft support analyst, and we are trying to grap a dump of the print spooler process (spoolsv.exe) while it is in the 'non-working' state. We are so far unable to ... we can grab dumps of other processes (using a couple of tools, one being 'procdump.exe' from sysinternals), but when we try to grab a dump of the spoolsv.exe process, it doesn't create one.

I have noticed that once we make the affected user (yes, the issue is per user, not per system) an admin, the default checkmark reappears, so this may have something to do with the profile becoming corrupt to the point where it no longer has rights to do anything with the print spooler service (or the service it is dependent on, the RPC service).

I now have two affected machines at my desk. One I have upgraded from SP2 to SP3 which might actually fix the issue, but there are apps in our environment that don't work with XP2 SP3 yet. Nor are we willing to grant users (especially those that are auto-login) admin rights to the workstations. I'm planning on spending part of the day tomorrow testing an affected system focusing on properties of the print spooler and RPC services.

I am ironically happy to learn that we aren't the only company out there that has this issue...

Please continue to read this thread!

[chrislyork]

Scrabble,

Most of the users in my environment have to log into windows with admin rights because of a banking software package we use (it needs to alter an .ini file in the \windows\system32 directory for some reason at each login).

We also have Win XP SP3 loaded on all the affected machines.

[ScrabbleVoice]

We are still on SP2 in our environment (the task of updating 3000+ computers to SP3 is a large project, plus some apps don't work on SP3); I was looking at the HKCU/software/microsoft/windows nt/current version/windows directory and I found that when the users cannot choose the default printer (and the default checkmark is gone), the 'device' line is gone from the key. Once the print spooler is reset and the printer list refreshed, the device line reappears. I checked permissions on the hive and key (HKCU) and all looks as it should. It looks like MS had a response to this type of situation and it is to rebuild the profile (which is what I've been doing until I can find out the root cause). Not quite sure if SP3 would resolve my particular situation though...

[chrislyork]

If SP3 isn't resolving my issue I doubt it would resolve yours. I need to check the registry to see if the same thing is happening to me.

[chrislyork]

Scrabble,

I can confirm that what you said in post #6 does in fact happen in my environment as well.

"I was looking at the HKCU/software/microsoft/windows nt/current version/windows directory and I found that when the users cannot choose the default printer (and the default checkmark is gone), the 'device' line is gone from the key. Once the print spooler is reset and the printer list refreshed, the device line reappears."