Printer Spooler Failure - Networked Printers - Random Occurances

Hi All,

We've been tackling a problem on our network which doesn't seem to have a solution, so far anyway.

On a few of our PC's the spooler service seems to fail and stop itself without any real cause.
A temporary fix for the issue has been to delete all drivers that have been installed via the network using the account of the user experiencing the issue. The driver packages are removed using admin rights, throught the Printer Management console, using a 'trick' of restarting the printer spooler and hitting the delete button just a the right moment in the printer management console.

This only solves the issue for a short period of time. The other more permanent workaround has been to rebuild the PC from scratch using a fresh image.

We recently built a fresh laptop, fully updated and came across the issue within hours of the laptop being used.

We have a mixture of printer models, mainly Dell 3110/3115, Dell 3765dnf, as well as HP printers using the Universal Printer Driver.

Any help would be much appreciated.

If any more detail is need please let me know.

Thanks for your help.

Anyone???

Fixed the issue in the end.

Searched around the internet and found that the problem relates to PDF's being printed via a HP printer using a version of HP's Universal printer driver. When using advanced features such as duplex printing, the driver corrupts the print spooler service and shuts itself down, causing printer errors.

In our case (Windows 7 SP1 x64 box), go to the directory location 'C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\W32X86\3' and delete the file 'HPCPN6de.dll'. Once removed, restart the print spooler service or restart the computer and the issue should be resolved.

If it reoccurs, check that the file has not been re-added to your system via group policy or some form of login script; if so consider removing it from your print server and upgrading the Universal Print Driver to HP's latest version.