Solved Printer shared Win7, but access stopped at the computer.

[xmodius]

Hello. My apologies for the vague title, there's not a lot of room to sumarize. Here's the issue:

A printer shared on a Windows 7 pc cannot be accessed because the user is stopped when accessing the computer itself.

Sound confusing? Allow me to clarify...

The hosting computer is a Windows 7 Pro (32 bit) machine with a shared printer attached, hereafter referred to as: W7x86. It's on a workgroup with the following other computers: Win 7 Home x64 laptop (W7x64) Win 8 CP Media PC (W8x86), Win XP Pro laptop (WinXP).

I'm not using homegroups, and there are shared folders on the W7x86 computer which are accessible by the right accounts (e.g. administrator has access to the whole thing, whereas other accounts only have access to specialized shared folders).

Here's the specific problem I'm encountering. The printer is shared with EVERYONE allowed access to print and manage documents. However, if you try to add the printer on any of the other computers (XP, Win 7, Win 8), you are blocked by the request for additional permissions to connect to the hosting computer. The only account allowed past this point is the administrator account (which I don't know why, since I'm only trying to access a shared printer). Once you're past this point, you can add the printer. So I'm sure you're thinking, "That's just UAC or installer permissions." There's more...

Once this printer is added, I'll restart one of the connecting computers in question (say the W7x64 laptop), and when I log back on the printer is added. However, when I try to print to it, I cannot. The printer cannot be accessed, and print jobs will hang in the queue. The ONLY way to get them to go through is to try to connect to the host computer (W7x86) say by clicking on it in the network computers, which will then request an account to authenticate (admin). Once you've authenticated, ta da... print jobs go through.

So I know this is something jacked up in my permissions settings, but I'll be dipped if I can figure out where. No one has a "deny" permission set anywhere.

Any help would be deeply appreciated.

 

[xmodius]

I feel like an idiot for not thinking of the simple solutions...

One of the first things to remember in a workgroup environment is the end users have the unfortunate flexibility of having different passwords for each account they have on every computer (unlike a domain environment). Such a simple solution, but I didn't think of it 'till now because I work in a domain environment 99% of the time.

So yeah, said user changed their password on their laptop and didn't tell me, thus the host computer said, "Hey your password's not valid." Change the passwords to match and...

*sigh* Problem solved.