Printing Issues Caused By Two Files In /C/Windows/System32/Spool/PRINTERS/

[Jayce]

At work we have a domain environment. The issue I thought existed only with XP Pro. Long story short, when users go to print and suddenly can't print anything at all to any printer, network or local, it's been caused by two files that create themselves in the directory:

C:/Windows/System32/spool/PRINTERS/

We are flirting with Windows 7 rollouts, but still running into quirks that we are having to work out. Surprisingly, today one of our Windows 7 users ran into the exact same thing above. I navigated to that folder, nuked the two files in it, BAM - printing fully restored.

The files were a randomly named SHD file and a Shockwave Flash Object file. No idea what relevance they were, but in my experience with XP, deleting them fixed the issue, and likewise it fixed it with the Win 7 user I worked with today.

In the past on XP machines, I was able to determine the users who experience this the most are the users who print off PDF documents rather frequently. This is something that can happen as infrequently as once every 3 months, or as often (as the Win 7 user explained) as once every 2 weeks.

Any insight on this? I find it strange, and a simple fix. But I'm curious on learning more about why it happens and how (if at all) it can be avoided.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Yeah I had the same issues at my work on a couple of the PCs.

They're basically just temp files that windows creates when it prints something, it's meant to delete them after but sometimes I guess it glitches. I just setup a script which runs every 5 mins if the queue is empty or if the jobs in the queue have been there for more than 15 minutes, checks for any files with the temp extensions and deletes them (and the old jobs if applicable)

 

[Jayce]

Yeah I had the same issues at my work on a couple of the PCs.

They're basically just temp files that windows creates when it prints something, it's meant to delete them after but sometimes I guess it glitches. I just setup a script which runs every 5 mins if the queue is empty or if the jobs in the queue have been there for more than 15 minutes, checks for any files with the temp extensions and deletes them (and the old jobs if applicable)

Well, that's what I had always assumed, but it's good to know that it's not a major deal. With your systems in particular, did you ever notice that they were more frequent with users who print PDFs?

Did you ever have any side effects of the script you wrote, or was it always spot-on and took care of the issue?

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Well pretty much all users here print PDFs, so sorry can't help you on that point.

As to side effects, yeah there were a few originally. E.g. the original script I didn't check to see if anything was printing or was in the queue, just deleted at will. That sometimes caused a job to be lost or stopped. Apart from that, works just fine 99.99% of the time. The 0.01% is sometimes a queue will stop and error anyway, I think it might just be uber bad timing with the temp files just being added while the script tries to delete them or something, but yeah all I have to do then is restart the job in the queue and all is well.

 

[xxtoddxx]

I was at a customers home today and She said her printer just "stopped working" in win7 home premium 64 bit. The printer is a Dell All in one Pictbridge 942. First I made sure that the printer was set as default and rebooted the system and tons of Avon orders printed out.. So I right clicked on the printer icon in control panel and canceled all print cues and tried to print something and got a spool error; so I did a ctrl+alt+del and went to task manager and processes and seen that the Spool was off. So I tried to right click and turn it on and i get an access denied message. Could this be the fix? Thanks ahead of time.. Todd