Removing Printers with a Machete…
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 | Tech Help
As a sys admin, the bane of my existence are printers. In fact I think I could make a list on how I hate them so, but that is for another time. Back to the story. In the past month I have had to take out my machete, enter the deep dark jungle of the registry and hack out all reference to printers and printer servers , twice.
Back in early August a user reported that they could not print to a specific tray (manual feed) on a HP Laser Jet 4350. Deleting the printer did nothing. Restarting didn't clear it up. Logging in as a different user didn't work. Printing to the manual tray from other PCs work fine. It was just this one PC. This is where I started sharpening my machete and called up another IT pro and picked his brain. He had only seen this type of behavior once before. He suggested removing all instances of this printer from the registry.
So in I went. I fired up regedit, entered the name of the printer in the search field and hit enter. I had never done this kind of hacking of the registry before. I had removed many keys, added even more, but never had I gone in and deleted large branches before. Not surprisingly there were many places Windows stashed away references to the problem printer. At this point I had decided to cut out all references to printers and print servers. After hacking out the keys and restarting the PC, the user was able to print to the manual tray. Problem solved and another tool to combat pesky printers had been added to my tool box.
The second occurrence happened today. This time the user reported that they were not able to print a report to a Sharp multifunction (AR-M450U) copier in landscape mode. Each time the print was printed out in portrait mode and this printer had started this behavior recently. I remembered that I had just moved this printer onto another server after the server had run out of disk space (built before my time and who makes a primary partition with 4GB of space anyways? ugg this is another post all on its own). This memory triggered to think that it was probably another registry issue. Back into the registry I went, again hacking out all references to printers and printer servers. Again, after a restart the issue was cleared. The user could now print in landscape to the problem printer.
I hope these two real world examples help out some other poor sys admin when he/she are dealing with odd ball printer problems.
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