Network printers losing connections

[pgoers]

I have a Win 7 Professional 64-bit user who intermittently loses connection to all of his networked printers. The printers show with the warning symbols and "no connectivity" message when I open Devices and Printers. When I restart the print spooler locally, it has no effect. I have to restart the print spooler on the Win 2003 server and then he gets reconnected to the printers and can print again.

This is a newly installed Win 7 Pro pc that was installed with 4 other identical pcs. The others are not having any issues.

Any help appreciated.

 

[chev65]

After some searching around I found the only listed fix is to disable bidirectional printing, I believe that is referring to the machine with the problem.

Disable Bidirectional on the ports tab of the print properties. The
language monitor for the device is requiring a resource which is only
available to system or admins (this is why the jobs print after restarting
the spooler).

In fact the same problem was fixed many times by disabling bidirectional printing.

SOLUTION that worked for us
SOLUTION: Disable Bi-directional in the printer's properties (if it's on a Print Server, you have to do this on print queue's printer properties).

I thought maybe the printer was sending or expecting some info to or from the queue, so I thought of Bi-Directional printing. I remembered it from back in the mid-90s doing tech support with consumer printers, and figured it couldn't hurt to try it on enterprise network printing.

This has happened to us a few times with random and different HP models.

This has fixed it every time.

Good luck!

 

[dmd7765]

I tried this, did not work for me. Windows SBS 2011 Standard, Windows 7 Pro 64 bit