Terminal Server Printers

Not sure exactly where this fits.

I was wondering what you guys thought would be the best way to handle this situation.

From another post on this forum I learned that a problem on my network was probably caused by a bad print driver (Print Spooler was continually needing to be restarted). We are running multiple Terminal Servers +1 Print Server. There are some dozen printers in the building with at least half of the users needing multiple printers available to them.

As I understand it, each printer must be installed both on the Print Server and on each Terminal Server. Anytime we have an issue where we have to reinstall a printer, the users must re-add that printer after removing the old one. Yes I understand this is probably old news to most of you, but I'm laying the groundwork just in case

So, if I dont know which driver or on which server the bad driver(s) resides, what would you suggest next? Also, if for the sake of being thurough, I wanted to purge them all anyway, what would be the smoothest way to re-establish all of the printers for each user since the old printers listed for them would then be invalid? Am I missing something in my assumption that that would be the case? or is there some useful tool or program that I have overlooked?

Thanks in advance.

 

Have you considered using the PrintUI.dll facility?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;189105&Product=win2000

To see the possibilities:

Start, Run, CMD
rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /?

Relatedly, see: http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/NetPrinterAllUsers.htm

Finally, for the cleanup, if the Print Spooler service is problematic, or you want to make certain there are no printer driver remnants, you can use cleanspl.exe from the Windows 2000, XP or 2003 Resource Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...9-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en). cleanspl.exe from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit tools will work on Windows XP.

Some information about cleanspl.exe (from MS-MVP Bruce Sanderson):

cleanspl.exe does a very thorough job of cleaning up the print spooler stuff, but it does not remove the spooler service dependency on the Lexmark service (see special information about Lexmark printer drivers).

You can use it to clean up the spooler stuff on another computer (i.e. remotely).

When you run it, it asks you if you want to remove some things that are actually delivered (and installed by default) with Windows. In most cases, you should answer No to the corresponding prompts (you don't want to remove the Standard TCP/IP Port or the BJ Language Monitor).