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Windows 'loses' printers after some while

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by mkoskenk

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One of our employees recently started experiencing problems with printing out documents. When trying to print out something from MS Word / other Office products The following dialog appears:

The printer has not yet responded, but the Microsoft Office program may be able to proceed without printer information. Do you want to wait for the printer? [Yes / No]

If you click No, then the normal print setup screen appears, but you are still not able to print out anything.

When trying to print from Adobe reader, you'll only get an error message stating that "You have to install a printer before trying to print".

The problem was solved by rebooting, but the same problem reappeared the following day - after the computer being left on over the night. Again, rebooting solved the issue but I'm certain this is again only a temporary solution.

We are using network printers and everyone else is able to print without problems. The employee concerned is working on XP x64, but as we have also other employees on x64 workstations, I don't think this is a driver issue.

I would be very grateful if anyone had ideas about this.

3 replies

by shasca

Check the event viewer, and see if there are any Spooler events. If the spooler service stops running print on the local PC comes to a hault. Restarting it will resolve the issue, just like rebooting does in your case.

If it is the Spooler service, you will need to look into what is causing it to crash.

by mkoskenk

Hi shasca and thank you for your reply. Let's see if the problem still persists and if it does I'll start figuring out the cause. I'll follow-up here if I bump into something.

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