Dave Hildebrand.com » printer

Printers = Hate

Dave — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 22:48:40 +0000

A user reported an issue with her printer this afternoon. Whenever she tried to print it locked up her PC. I tried all my usual tricks to hack out the offending job, but nothing I tried was working. The print spooler would crash seconds after starting. This error kept taunting me:

“Spoolsv.exe – Application Error”

“The instruction at “0x77fcc2c0″ referenced memory at “0×00000000″.

“The memory could not be written.”

I popped out my trusty Troubleshooting Swiss Army Knife (read: Google) and quickly had another tool to fight the tenacious spooler.

It turns out the most common cause of the error is an abundance of .SHD and .SPL files in the spool directory. These files are created by the spooler to save the spooled data of a print job. The .SPL file comprises drawing commands and the .SHD file comprises job settings information of the print job.

To fix spoolsv.exe application error, you will have to remove these files from the system. To do this, perform the following steps on your Windows XP computer:

Open Control Panel, select Performance and Maintenance, select Administrative Tools and then select the Services option.
In the Services management console, locate the Spooler services, right-click on it and select Stop.
Next, open the C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers folder. (Here, we are assuming that your Windows is installed in the default C:\Windows folder)
Delete all the .SHD and SPL files from this folder.
Next, open the TMP folder and delete all old and unused files from this folder.
Finally, restart the Spooler service from the Services management console.

Just like that the users printer problems disappeared.

Print Head Cleaning…

Dave — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:52:52 +0000

Our Canon MP390 has been printing black text poorly for a weeks. Running the cleaning application did nothing to help the poor prints. Luckily the MP390 has a removable print head. Unlike most other printer manufacturers, Canon does not build print heads into the new ink cartridges. Instead of paying for a new print head I popped it out and took it to the sink. A few minutes running under warm/hot water flushed it out. I then used a paper towel to get most of the water off of it. Make sure to not rub the print head, dab it onto a paper towel only. A can of compressed air does a good job of getting the last few droplets off the print head. After reinserting the ink cartridges, a few print head cleanings, an alignment and the printer was back printing like when it came out of the box.

Removing Printers with a Machete…

Dave — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 05:22:44 +0000

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.

Installing Printers for All Users

Dave — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:08:30 +0000

Do you ever get tired of installing the department printer for each user of a PC? Has your attempts to educate your users ended in frustration? Well thanks to a neat little tool built right into Windows, your troubles are over.

The command line tool is call rundll32.exe printui.dll. To get a complete list of options for this tool type:

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /?

The commands we are specifically looking at are the /ga & /gd options. These globally (all users on the PC) add or delete printers. Lets look at the usage of the command.

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry [options]

Lets give an example of the complete command.

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /ga /n \\printserver\finance

Here we are globally adding (/ga) a printer in the finance department. The printer (\finance) is located on the server \\printserver.

If we wanted to globally delete (/gd) the printer we would make the simple change below.

rundll32.exe printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /gd /n \\printserver\finance

You can then add these command lines to a batch (.bat) file and run it on all the PCs in the finance department and no matter where an employee in the finance logs in they will have access to the finance printer.

There are many more options available using printui.dll and rundll32.exe. Please feel free to share your usage of the command with the readers here.