Network printers are intermittently displayed incorrectly as offline in Windows 7

• Thursday, December 06, 2012 4:14 PM

   

   
  

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  This one REALLY has been driving me mad for months, now...
  
  The situation is this: I have several network printers, of varying makes and models, all shared with Group Policy from a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine.
  
  The clients are a mixture of Windows 7 64 and 32bit Enterprise. I used to host all the same printers on Server 2003, and had no issues.
  
  At any given time, any given user might find, when they go to print, that any printers that are added from this server to their machine all show as greyed out (in Devices and Printers), and are unavailable. However, on the server, they are clearly not offline, and the server can print test pages etc. The printers are not set to go into standby - they're 'awake' all the time.
  
  What I've found is, that after about ten or fifteen minutes, they will come back, and any documents that users have attempted to send will eventually print.
  
  However, this is incredibly frustrating, and I have to tend to three or four users per day who are having this problem.
  
  The only workarounds I have found are:
  
  - Sometimes going to the Devices and Printers folder, then making as if I'm adding a network printer (going as far as selecting 'Add Printer/Network Printer') gives it a kick, and they come back.
  
  - If the above doesn't work, I have to switch user to administrator, and restart the Print Spooler service. This USUALLY works, but not always.
  
  Microsoft know about this issue, and have provided a hotfix here:
  
  support.microsoft.com/kb/2713128
  
  However, it doesn't work. It comes in two flavours - 64bit and 32bit. The 64bit clients I've applied it to have no change in their behaviour, and the 32bit installer is corrupted, despite downloading it twice.
  
  I have researched this a lot, and found a forum some weeks back (which I now cannot find again) where a very lengthy discussion took place about this issue.
  
  Someone suggested that this problem is caused by something going wrong with SNMP, and that disabling SNMP on any affected printers would solve it. Many tried this, and agreed that it worked, but it doesn't work for me. I've disabled SNMP on both the printer property 'Configure Port' dialogue box, and on each printer's web interface, and no change.
  
  Someone else reported that being nominated as a local administrator solved the problem, which MIGHT be the case - I have a desktop machine at work, and a laptop: this never happens to me on the desktop (where despite being an AD admin anyway, I am nominated as a local admin), but it does on my laptop (where I'm not explicitly nominated as a local admin). I can't very well add all users as local admins, so this is no help.
  
  Does anyone have any suggestions? It's driving me mad.
  
  Many thanks.
  
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