NT 4 sp 6a Printing Problems

Try stopping and restarting the Spooler service through the Services applet.If this does not work,check to make sure that you have at least 50MB of free space.If it doesn't change the spool host drive and reboot the system.In addition sometimes it'sneccesary to delete the .SPL files from the spooler and restart.

You may have a resource conflict.
Start up Windows NT Diagnostics and see if everything matches the actual hardware.

If that dosen't work I would uninstall SP6a and return to SP5 unless it is needed for other reasons.

Also check your task manager and see how much your cpu utilization is. You may have one or more process that are using up all your cpu time.

let me know how it turns out.

are you using multiple network protocols? in particular are you using lanmanager?
If you are, I recommend you use only the needed ones and try to stick to TCP/IP only if you can.

Regards,

Haissam

I did a search on microsofts website on the event id and came up with alot of links, but this one in paticular

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q158/7/51.asp

The only other thing I see different is you didn't insall SP5 before 6. Might try that.

Good luck

What clients are using the print server? I remember that there were some issues pre-sp5 with 95/98 clients printing to NT causing the problems you describe. I know you say you're on SP6, but if you have a mix of clients it might be worth diverting your 95/98 users elsewhere to see if it fixes the problem.

Some fax software programs modify the registry. It might become necessary to remove the fax software in order to print. However, some programs do not clean up the registry when they are removed. Check the registry to see if there are entries added by a fax software program that might be causing one of the previous errors.

WARNING: Using Registry Editor incorrectly can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that problems resulting from the incorrect use of Registry Editor can be solved. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe) and locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print

Look for any entries that might be related to a fax software program.

Delete these entries.

NOTE: Do NOT delete any of the subkeys of the Print key, such as Environments, Forms, Monitors, Printers, and Providers.

NOTE: The symptoms described in this article may also be caused by third party port monitor software, and it may be necessary to remove the port monitor from the registry using the steps above.

Sorry about the bad link, but this is the article should have taken you to.

Do you have any fax software or port monitoring software running on the print server?

1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe) and locate the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSetControl\Print

2. Look for any entries that might be related to a fax software program.

3. Delete these entries.

NOTE: Do NOT delete any of the subkeys of the Print key, such as Environments,
Forms, Monitors, Printers, and Providers.

NOTE: The symptoms described in this article may also be caused by third party
port monitor software, and it may be necessary to remove the port monitor from
the registry using the steps above.

Also look at the registry key for port monitors.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSetControl\Print\Monitors

Are you using IP printing or are you using port monitoring software. If you have more than one partition on the drive, try moving the spooler to another drive. I found that I was having a problem with IP printing on one of our Minolta 6100 color printers. I switched over to use the port monitoring software provided by the vendor and now it seems to work fine. Can you give me some more details on your printing environment? TJ

How about test pages? Do they stall or hang up the que as well? I would unshare one printer in particular, change the port from IP to print monitoring software, whether HP or Minolta, share it again, and then try it out. I had this problem and the only solution I was able to figure out was using the printing software from the vendor/manufacturer. Try that out and let me know.

I had the same problems and events...
If you are using the HP Standard TCP/IP Monitor for your HP printers. You probably have a bad version.
You may be able to find a new version at HP with there search. If not, I have a pointer to the file I used, but I don't know how old it is. (ftp.hp.com/pub/networking/software and download hpspmnt.exe).

Stop the spooler, rename HPTCP*.* files in your system32 folder run hpspmnt.exe and start the spooler. I can't remember if I had to reboot the server, but if you have that luxury....

I had a simalar print server before and had a lot of problems with earlier service packs. But what I found is I had to reload the jetdirect software, only the part that give you the HP-TCPIP ports nothing else.(I was lucky because all but 3 of my 200 + printers were Jetdirect devices all had static address) then I redefined every printer using the IP address set as raw. and I was good to go. (this was a few day project) I also found if the printserver had any other piece of HP's software it sucked.

Note if I was to do it over I would put reservations in DHCP for the printers, I did get a few call after people did cold resets on the printer.

I hope this helps you.. if not you might want to format the box and start over.

Pete R

All these answers and no one suggest to try LPR Ports on the server??? Install TCIP Printing in networking on the server configure a new port for a printer and select LPR and put in the IP address of the printer, this NEVER fails, it's raw, it's basic, and it's stable, if it's crashing every time, you'll know soon enough!!!
Good Skill
Mike

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