Does Win/XP/Home sometimes change default printers?

I support a small office with a small network using Win/XP/Home on one PC and Win/XP/Pro on the other. Each PC has its own printer. The users of this system (who are NOT computer knoweldgable) report that sometimes the Win/XP/Home PC will change its default printer automatically to one of the other printers and try to print there. I haven't been able to reproduce this and it doesn't happen while I am there. On the other hand, the users assert that they do NOT change the default printer. Has anybody ever heard of this? Does Win/XP/Home sometimes change its default printer automatically for some reason?

Thanks for any response.

 

Almost certainly a user goof rather than a PC goof.

One way to check if the users can live with access to only a single printer for a while - with a side benefit that the user should get an error when he/she does whatever is changing the default machine - is to leave the everyone group with print permissions on the default printer but to remove the everyone group from the others and just put yourself in with permissions to do anything to it. Put the other users in as individual usernames and deny them print, manage, whatever.

I'm not positive but I imagine they won't be able to set a printer as default if they are denied all access to it. Easy enough to test that when you are on site.

 

Thanks, Newt, for your response. I agree that it must be a user error. On the other hand, I was on site last night for a few minutes and this time it happened to me. I printed on my local printer, then the next time I printed a page it went to the remote printer. I was doing a lot of file moving on the network, so it's concievable that I did something along the way. But I wasn't working with the printer setup at all, so don't understand how it could have happened. I am not very clear about how permissions and groups work on Win/XP since we have a small office and everybody has access to everything, but I will check that.

 

Also have a small home office network. 2 computers using WinXP/ home, 2 others on Win 98, so old can't be upgraded. And 5 shared printers hooked up. Default printer has never changed.

If you're just printing from each computer to its local printer try Newts suggestion.

Easiest way in XP/home is to go to Control Panel- Printers and Faxes -right click on printer - click Properties - Sharing tab- and check Do Not Share Printer. That will prevent any other computer printing to it.

Do that from each computer for it's local printer.

 

The way Ephemarial described is how we have the network set up at the church, so that each workstation prints off of its own printer, except the server, which can send a job to any printer, operator's choice. I often do my work at one of the networked stations, and then go into the office and do my printing from the server, because the printer for my area hates me. When it sees me coming, it starts chewing paper and blinking errors. No one else has ever complained about that printer, so it has me specifically targeted for its wrath.

At home I have 2 printers and Adobe Acrobat (which thinks it is a printer) so whenever I click on a print command I get a dialog box asking me to specify where to send the job. The "snap to" feature always puts the cursor on the default printer, btw.

Johanna

 

Roger - I was mainly suggesting that lock-down so the user would get an error when anything tried to make a change in the default printer and you could figure out what was causing the problem.

It is possible that an application is behaving badly and doing the deed. But with the logged on user locked down, the app shouldn't have more premissions than the user does unless the app is starting as a service and with an admin account.

You certainly could restrict folks to only a local printer but that would be sorta like my Gran used to say, "throwing the baby out with the bath water ".

 

Thanks to all who have replied so far. I will be trying to track it down in the next few days, and will let you know if I find anything. Thanks again.