windows xp

Printers = Hate

Monday, January 5th, 2009 | Tech Help | Comments Off

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 “0×77fcc2c0″ 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.

Tags: microsoft, printer, windows xp