printer spooling stops even after a restart

I have been using windows 7 without a problem on my laptop for about 3 months now. I have all the updates installed.

I have a series of printers that have worked without an issue for the past 3 months.

Just yesturday, I was in adobe and tryed to print a PDF when the program said I have no printers installed, I went to word and it said the same thing.

I opened up device manger and navigated to printers and I did not see a list of any printers installed.

I restarted the printer spooling in the admin Services area.

Once I restarted the spool, the printers reappeared. Once I tried to modify a printers properties, print a test page or print a document, the printers would diappear.

I would go back to the services area and have to turn printer spooling back on but it keeps stoping when I do something print related.

any advice....

not a cable issue.

These are 5 network printers. THere is nothing wrong with the printers. The actual printer spooling service that runs on the computer is stopping and will stop even after a restart of the machine or just the service.

The printers disapear from the device window on the windows 7 machine when the local printer spooling service stops. They all reappear once the service starts again.

The problem is that I can not keep the service from stopping.

print spooler is crashing due to a bad print driver.

happened to me on the mx850. i'm contacting canon because of this false advertising.

even without the installation of a new printer?

these printers worked great for months

it's probably just the most recent printer driver you installed that appears to be incomptatible with 7 as of the moment.

Are you getting Error 1813 and Error 1053?

My problems started with losing a connection to a Epson SX600FW All-in-One.

The printer was a network printer and my wife continued using it OK with XP, (I'm Win7). The printer went down with a mechanical fault so it went off for repair.

While it was away, i tried to install the Win7 drivers for a HP Officejet 7310 All-in-One, (it couldn't see it via USB), and the installation stopped with an Error 1813 telling me the Spooler needed restarting.

I found out how to do that and an got an Error 1053, saying it had tried to start but had took too long.

Now I don't know what to do - you could describe my computer knowledge as "Base Level Novice"!

I have been trying to chase a solution to this for several days now and not really getting anywhere.
I am a home user and a pensioner. I spent all my readies (£650) on the new computer and have none left for paid support. Nobody seems to be willing to help unless you give them a substantial amount of money. Even then it doesn't guarantee the errors will not return as they are most obviously inherrent bugs in Windows 7.
I have phoned MS Tech support today and they have given me a website address to use.
www.support.microsoft.com/ukget
Unfortunately it doesn't work! I phoned back to check if I had heard them correctly (and I had!), and when I told them I couldn't get to the website, (i.e. the link didn't work), they said that were issues with the site and that I would have to wait an indeterminate period for it to get up and running.
I am fast losing confidence in Microsoft - does anything of theirs actually work and can you rely on it?
Just out of interest, when I was unsure of what I was typing into my URL initially, I entered this:
www.support.microsoftsupport.com
I got a website offering error code fixes! My eyes lit up but were quicly extinguished when I tried to download the first link - I got an alert from my McAfee Virus/Spyware!
Anybody else got anything useful?

ffgtmck said:

I have been using windows 7 without a problem on my laptop for about 3 months now. I have all the updates installed.

I have a series of printers that have worked without an issue for the past 3 months.

Just yesturday, I was in adobe and tryed to print a PDF when the program said I have no printers installed, I went to word and it said the same thing.

I opened up device manger and navigated to printers and I did not see a list of any printers installed.

I restarted the printer spooling in the admin Services area.

Once I restarted the spool, the printers reappeared. Once I tried to modify a printers properties, print a test page or print a document, the printers would diappear.

I would go back to the services area and have to turn printer spooling back on but it keeps stoping when I do something print related.

any advice....

I have been looking around for solutions and a forum contributor by the name of encro on Microsoft Answers has offered this one.

Please let me know how you go on. I would be most interested!


The fix: Getting the spooler to start!

This seems to be a very common issue on Windows 7 caused by a recent "Important" update within the late March/early April period. I discovered the fix for this while working on a clients machine and noticed something abnormal in that the Print Spooler wasn't actually the Print Spooler anymore which is why it wouldn't start. Now that our team have fixed just under 20 machines using this process I'm pretty confident it is the workaround solution until a future WSUS update corrects this properly. This is still speculation at this stage since so far logfiles haven't really provided much help in troubleshooting this further and it may be unrelated to a KB from Windows Update.
I'm still trying to determine the actual update from Windows Update that caused the issue to notify Microsoft of the bug however the problem goes something like this:

Determining if this is the cause on your computer.

Check in %windir%\system32 (C:\Windows\System32) for the existence of spoolsv.exe.org and spoolsv.exe

If they both exist then it is likely the following issue.

Compare the file size of spoolsv.exe

Sometimes the real spoolsv.exe will be named spoolsv.exe.org [545KB] and in the place of spoolsv.exe place will actually be a 41KB file posing as the print spooler. I'm guessing the system backed up the original spooler at some point and replaced it accidently with something else. spoolsv.exe should be the 545KB file at this stage.

Correcting the problem

Step 1: Rename spoolsv.exe to spoolsv.bak

Step 2: Rename spoolsv.exe.org to spoolsv.exe
Renaming spoolsv.exe.org here is a little more tricky as it requires changing the file ownership from TrustedInstaller to the Administrator Group and giving the group full write permissions for the file. This likely has security implications so it's recommended to revert the permissions after the file is renamed.

By changing the Ownership of the file from TrustedInstaller to Administrator then enabling Full Modify for the Administrator Group you can swap the files over by renaming and correct this issue.

I usually rename spoolsv.exe to spoolsv.bak and then rename spoolsv.exe.org to become the actual spoolsv.exe.

Step 3:

Start the print spooler via Services (services.msc) or at the command prompt using net start spooler.

Instant <3 from the Spooler and a major headache for many people finally fixed :)