Ok, this is a strange one, occasionally some clients, will have broken printers installed. These printers, will cause obnoxious timeouts, usually first when you try to select the printer in the control panel, then another timeout when you right click it or try to open the propertiese, usually 2 more timeouts to delete it.
This is my concern because one of my programs processes is to ask the system what printers it has installed. The problem being is it will hang until it times out for each broken printer. So far it amounts to about 15 minutes per printer.
I have written code to “give up” on printer checking if it takes longer than 2 minutes. However I cannot test this code as I cannot reproduce the problem here at work.
So far I have tried changing my printers share name, my printers physical name (Which caused it to break, but was instant, no timeout).
I have simply tried unplugging the network cable, and even just turning the printer off (Unplug), and mysteriously I can still open the propertise of the printer and still access it as if it’s fine. I tried changing my permissions on the server so that my user had no permissions, I just get permission denied and it STILL let’s me view the printer propertise.
My next idea was changing the IP address, but I suspect that will just cause it to immediatly report the printer not found.
Any other ideas anyone?
