Random Print Jobs of 999 Pages

We have been having some odd printing issues. It only happens when there are people in the building. It spits out random Office files. I have checked for viruses and spyware with four different software packages.

When I look on our SBS 2008 server only one page is printed but is still an MS Office document. The really odd thing is that it is almost always a random Office template. Any ideas? Microsoft told me that they had never seen or heard of this. And this was from the developers. Then they said good luck. Thanks I am so glad that I paid for the incident.

ehrendreich said:

We have been having some odd printing issues. It only happens when there are people in the building. It spits out random Office files. I have checked for viruses and spyware with four different software packages.

When I look on our SBS 2008 server only one page is printed but is still an MS Office document. The really odd thing is that it is almost always a random Office template. Any ideas? Microsoft told me that they had never seen or heard of this. And this was from the developers. Then they said good luck. Thanks I am so glad that I paid for the incident.

I haven't phoned MS for support for quite some time, but as I recall, if they can't resolve the issue there is no charge. You might want to check on that.

In regards to the issue you are having, I am not going to pretend that my background is superior to MS developers, so, if they don't know the cause, I am going to gracefully bow out.

HTH

Bizarre.

Okay, this will probably not be received well by your users, but here's what I'd do;

Install a PDF printer on everyone's computer. I like "Cute PDF" myself, just be careful not to let it install the toolbar and reset your home page and default search engine. (rudeware as it were)

Make that PDF printer the default on everyone's computer and monitor it to see which computer loads up with PDFs. The user will be prompted to assign a name to the PDF when it "prints".

That will at least let you pin down where the job is coming from.

Good luck with it. (and that "good luck" didn't cost you a dime)

Thank you for your reply. I have been watching it on our machines using PDF and I wrote a program to monitor the server. I can see what machine and how many pages are going through the spooler. I can see the print job but they are only showing up as one page prints. I have my printer support people coming in tomorrow. I have never seen anything like this in 30 years of being a systems engineer.