We have a Windows Server 2008 R2 print server and my boss and I cannot figure out how to restart the spooler for only 1 printer. It is not feasible for us to restart the entire print spooler bringing down all our printers because of 1 printer that is hung up. We tried putting all the drivers into isolated mode, but cannot find any option that would allow us to reset just 1 printer. Does anyone have an idea? If this is not an option on Windows 2008, shame on you Microsoft.

You can't. The print spooler need to be restarted. Those issue are behing caused by bad driver usually. Does that printer is host based by the way ? (thus would explain why you got problem with it) Be warned sometime even host-based printer does have a NIC card, but that does not make them any more sharable on a print server. In last attempt, if it's hostbased just put a hp laserjet4 driver on it. It's pretty standard with everything. Quote: from http://www.intel.com/support/netport/sb/cs-015186.htm Unfortunately, the printer drivers for these printers are often designed to communicate back and forth with the printer-they can't take a stream of data from a PC or print server without communicating between the printer and the driver. If this bi-directional communication is required for a printer driver to work, it often cannot be networked. Printers that double as fax machines often have this restriction. These printers are not designed for use on networks but many of them can be finessed into working with an external print server. MCP | MCTS 70-236: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring

Arg. That quote from Intel is so old it's not widely applicable any more. host-based printers are typically large batch or ultra-fast, and very specialised. bi-di can certainly be a challenge on old printers. this Intel article was written for their external Netport printserver units, and in 25years i've never seen an external printserver do a great job. i think this quote from Intel is largely irrelevant to the OP's issue anyway. Don In small office I still see issue with so-ho printer, thats why Iam pulling that information, as if the printer driver is not ok or the printer itselt it will bring the spooler in problem. Like; HP Color LaserJet 1500, 2600n, 3500 and 3550 Series Printers - Host-based Printing Strategy for a newer document about hostbased. My idea is that if he got to restart the spooler to remake the printqueue work, then the driver is not ok in most case. If the spooler work or not for other printer is another question. (With Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, an administrator can, as an option, configure a printer driver to run in an isolated process--a process that is separate from the spooler process. By isolating the driver, the administrator can prevent a fault in a driver component from halting the print service. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff560836(v=vs.85).aspx) MCP | MCTS 70-236: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring

The printer has worked fine for quite a while. Just on rare occasions the queue gets backed up for whatever reason. We can usually just cancel all the jobs in the queue and that fixes it, but there are times when we have to restart the print spooler to fix it. To me it's just a bad design that the MS printer server has one spooler that to fix one printer, you must affect all the other printers. We are migrating from a Novell print server where each printer could have its spooler stopped and restarted without affecting the other printers.

Quote: from http://www.intel.com/support/netport/sb/cs-015186.htm Unfortunately, the printer drivers for these printers are often designed to communicate back and forth with the printer-they can't take a stream of data from a PC or print server without communicating between the printer and the driver. If this bi-directional communication is required for a printer driver to work, it often cannot be networked. Printers that double as fax machines often have this restriction. These printers are not designed for use on networks but many of them can be finessed into working with an external print server. Arg. That quote from Intel is so old it's not widely applicable any more. host-based printers are typically large batch or ultra-fast, and very specialised. bi-di can certainly be a challenge on old printers. this Intel article was written for their external Netport printserver units, and in 25years i've never seen an external printserver do a great job. i think this quote from Intel is largely irrelevant to the OP's issue anyway.Don

there's a dedicated print forum where your question is better directed: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-AU/winserverprint/threads in my experience, if any jobs are printing, then the spooler process isn't hung. i've never seen a spooler hang affect a single printer and not the whole box. in my experience a spooler hang is a fairly rare event, but i have seen it happen and a bad driver was the cause. you could try moving the printer to a temporary server so as not to affect other printers, whilst you work on the issue, try other drivers, etc. if you need to stop/start printers or spoolers or server on any kind of regular/frequent basis, something is horribly wrong in your environment. i have 3500 printers and rarely face the issue. my Novell days are long behind me but i still have z/OS, hp-ux, solaris, SAP, linux and windows to deal with. i don't miss novell netware much. Don