Bizzarre Dissapearing Printers Error

aleix1979

Hi all!

Happy New Year!

I have a rather peculiar situation. Some users are connecting to a Server via Remote Desktop and when they try to print with Navision, all printers in the Server dissapear! :shock:

That didn't happen before and they are printing into a particular printer by setup. :?

Any ideas/experience anyone? :roll:

JulianHarper

This used to be a common bug in Windows 9x, but I've never seen it in an NT class OS.

What version of Windows is the server running?
Are the printers setup locally on the server or are they per user (ie pointing to a shared printer on another server)?
Have you searched the MS KB?

aleix1979

Hi Julian. Thanks for the quick response.

I doubt they have Win9x. I will ask though.

I'm a developer and only get incredible amounts of confusion from the Ms pages

JulianHarper

Oddly enough this happened to me today on an Windows 2003 Server through Terminal Services

The reason it happened was because the Spooler service had crashed, this causes all of the printers to disappear for all users. Just restarting the service brought them all back, people didn't even need to log off.

Ask the people to check the spooler service, and check the event log to see if it's constantly crashing. If it is see if they can diagnose the problem and fix it.