Printing issue, I'm stumped.

There is a job stuck in the print queue and I can't get it out for the life of me. The printer I'm using is a Lexmark S405 and I have it hooked up using the wireless interface that way I can access it from all the computers on my home network. I'm running Vista Home Premium on one machine and Windows 7 Home Premium on the other. This is what happened, I don't want to leave out any details.

Yesterday morning I was buying some tickets off of Ticketmaster. When I went to print them, it said it couldn't do it because my Adobe Reader was out of date so I upgraded it. I tried to reprint and it was giving me the same thing. I tried doing it on another computer, same thing, same process, same results. So I rebooted both machines and tried again. Nothing. So I've now got a bunch of jobs stuck in the print queue. No big deal, I'll just go into the printer on both machines, cancel all the jobs, and see if I can try to print the job again. Wrong, but somewhere in the middle of all that it managed to spit out my tickets because they were laying in the tray when I walked into the other room to check after the 3rd time or so.

Anyway, canceling all jobs got rid of all of them except one job on both machines. No big deal, I'll just stop the Print Spooler service in the Services console, wait a minute, and restart it. Did that on both machines, and the thing is still there. No big deal, I haven't taken my A+ exam yet but I've taken the classes for it. I should be able to tackle this no problem. I go into the command line (both machines) and type in "net stop spooler", wait a minute or two, and then type in "net start spooler". It cleared the job out of the queue on one of the machines but the stupid thing is still stuck in the other one. So I went into C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS and tried to delete the files in there but it says the file is in use and won't let me get rid of it. I turned everything off (computer, printer, router, modem), waited about 15 minutes, turned on my modem, waited for the lights to quit flashing, turned on my router, waited for the connection to establish, turned on my computer, logged in, and turned on my printer. Once the printer established a connection I went into the print queue to see if the job is gone and it's still there.

Somebody please help. :cry The machine it's hung on is the Vista one. Shocking, I know.

 

Hello,
When you try to delete the files (files with a shd and spl extention) in C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, was the spooler stopped? Do the net stop spooler cmd and then delete the files. Then start the spooler.

 

Hey PunyN00b,

You may want to try...

1. on Vista, go to the print queue.
2. Right click on the job and select Cancel from the menu.
3. Wait 30 seconds and then shutdown Vista completely (don't reboot).
4. Pull the plug on the printer (don't power it off via the power button).
5. Power up Vista.
6. Return to the print queue.
7. Right click on the job and select Cancel from the menu. Wait momentarily and the job should disappear.
8. Power down Vista again completely.
9. Plug in the printer and power it up. Wait 1 minute.
10. Power up Vista and Return to the print queue. Wait 30 seconds to confirm that the job does not reappear.
11. If all is well, print a test page.

*For people that share a printer from a computer on their network and have this same problem, follow these steps...

1. On the computer where the print job is erroring, right click on the job and select Cancel from the menu.
2. Wait 30 seconds and then completely shutdown that computer (dont reboot).
3. On the computer that shares the printer, go to the print queue.
4. Right click on the job and select Cancel from the menu.
5. Wait 30 seconds and then shutdown that computer completely (don't reboot).
6. Pull the plug on the printer (don't power it off via the power button).
7. Power up the computer that shares the printer.
8. Return to the print queue.
9. Right click on the job and select Cancel from the menu. Wait momentarily and the job should disappear.
10. Power that computer back down completely.
11. Plug in the printer and power it up. Wait 1 minute.
12. Power up the computer that shares the printer. Wait 1 minute.
13. Power up the other computer and return to the print queue. Wait 30 seconds to confirm that the job does not reappear.
14. If all is well, print a test page.

Techsent

 

Okay, I got the print queue cleared out (deleted the files in %system root%\system32\spool\PRINTERS while the print spooler was stopped) but that just revealed another problem.

Nothing I send from the internet is printing. Every single job is getting hung and they won't clear out when I try to cancel them from the queue. I have to stop the spooler, clear the files from that folder, and restart the spooler in order for them to go away. If I send a file from Open Office, Notepad, Microsoft Office, or whatever it prints. But if I try to print a job from the internet it just gets stuck. I don't understand what's going on.

 

Any errors in your event logs?

 

Upon investigating this further the issue appears to be isolated to my Vista PC. My Windows 7 laptop is working fine. Now that the hung job is out of the way I can send print jobs to my printer without issue. I plugged a USB wireless adapter into another Windows 7 PC I have and it worked fine too. This Vista PC has been a royal pain for about the last year or so. I think the OS has been corrupted somehow and I can't figure out what the problem is (it's slow as Christmas, various little things fail here and there, Windows Update is broken, it blue screens at times, etc...). I've already been in the malware removal forum several times and we've determined that the issues I'm experiencing aren't malware related. I've been threatening to wipe it for a while now, I just haven't yet because it's kind of the family computer and everybody has their stuff saved on it. I don't want to wipe it and lose something important. People have their iPhones synced to this thing, and I don't have one so I don't know how all that works (I've heard if you delete iTunes then you lose your iPhone stuff and pretty much have to start over. Like I said though, I don't have an iPhone and I've never even used iTunes so I don't have the slightest clue.) Anyway...

Looking at Event Viewer on this PC (the Vista machine) it shows a total of 40,593 errors, 23,084 in the last 7 days, and 4,044 in the last 24 hours. roflmao

My laptop is less impressive. It only shows 6 in the last 24 hours. 3 DHCP Client (Event ID: 1002), 2 Customer Experience Improvement Program (Event ID: 1008), and 1 Service Control manager (Event ID: 7011). Going back and cross checking with the Vista PC, I noticed that both machines had common instances of Event IDs 1002 and 7011 (the Vista PC had 1 of each in the same time frame).

 

Hi

Yes, a format/reinstall would definitely be the way to go. If you have multiple users, repeat these steps to backup all personal files (including the Public "user" profile):

Go to C:\Users\%username%\ and copy the Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Videos folders to your backup media (external HDD, etc.).

In iTunes, be sure to go to Store, Deauthorize this Computer, and complete the steps to deauthorize it. Everything in iTunes is in each user's Music folder (in the iTunes subfolder) under their username (which if you followed the above step, will be backed up). Simply copy the backed up folders back to their respective user accounts once you've reinstalled Windows and setup the user accounts (or if only one user account is used, it's much simpler). When you reinstall iTunes, you will have to authorize the computer again, and everything should be back to normal.

I don't have too much experience with iTunes, so if someone that uses it regularly has a better suggestion, feel free to pitch in!

Also, keep in mind that when you reinstall Windows, you will likely have to call Microsoft to get it activated again.

 

Yeah, I figured as much. I already know how to get whatever files I need backed up and all that, and actually have already done it for the most part. I probably need to delete the backups I have though and do them again, it's been a couple of months. All the programs running on it are either open source programs that came from the internet or I have disks for, so I'm not too worried about that either. Plus it's an HP so it has the factory recovery partition installed which is probably what I'll use. The only thing that I'm leary of is the iTunes thing, that's really the only thing that's stopped me from a reformat already.

Also, anyone got any recommendations for some good open source disk imaging software (something along the lines of Acronis)? I know Windows 7 has this feature built into the OS, which is why I'm contemplating popping in my UBCD and using KillDisk, then using one of my MSDNAA licences for Windows 7 but I don't want to waste one and plus that recovery partition is so easy pretty much anybody could use it if they needed to.