Windows 7 Spooler Hangs on boot
I've seen several people start threads on this subject but none of them have a solution. I have several Windows 7 32-bit Professional machines that are printing to a Ricoh Aficio MP C2050 across the network. I had them printing through a server, but now have them printing directly to the printer itself. Here is what happens: On boot, the user brings up Outlook 2k7 and then Word 2k7. Word never makes it past it's splash screen. Going into Devices and Printers the window hangs. I can't stop the Printer Spooler service. I have to do 'taskkill /im spoolsv.exe /f' then start the service. Everything is fine after that until the machine is rebooted. I have disable bidirectional communication on the TCP port. I have tried setting the port to RAW. This seems to work, except print jobs take hours to print. Putting it on LPR the print jobs come out at normal speed but this problem persists. I have reloaded the drivers. Cleared out the spool folder. No luck. Please, please, please if someone knows how to fix this, let me know. I can't believe MS would see all these posts for this exact problem on their forums and remain so silent about it.
May 13th, 2011 12:44pm

We are experiencing the exact same error on most of our win7 64bit sp1 workstations, all using office 2010. it is not consistent though, sometimes they do boot with out error, makes trouble shooting even more of a mission. We have tried the same steps as you describe, as well as updating the printer drivers, removing pdf writers that we thought were causing the issue and removing unwated drivers in print server properties. no errors in event viewer. The spooler service claims to be running, but if we try to restart it, it fails to restart and actually just stops. Then we start it and all is well... until the next reboot All our W/S use the same print server with the same share and driver. it has not always been a problem, but has definitely increased in the last month. We now have a spooler rush every morning to get all staff up and running... very frustrating.
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May 25th, 2011 2:27am

After looking at another W/S, there is an error in event viewer system log: A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the Spooler service. Event ID: 7011
May 25th, 2011 2:47am

We will try the driver isolation test. The spooler does not "hang" when printing, only at login. After login, we kill the spooler service, start it and all is fine until the next reboot. We are using the latest driver for all our printers and the 64bit drivers have been installed in the manner described above.
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May 27th, 2011 4:36am

I do not think it is printer driver related... We have tried to isolate drivers and have also gone as far as removing all printers and deleting drivers, and the problem persists.
June 21st, 2011 9:35am

We have had same issue with a number of Acer laptops runnning W7 pro and W7 Ultiimate. Seemed to start after Windows updates around time of SP1 though have not been able to identify which, update is responsible. removing and reinstalling selective updates was not conclusive. restore to previous condition only sometimes fixed the issue but my laptop today can either reboot with or without the issue, and I have ONCE seen it in my home PC with Win 7 Ultimate. Other symptoms are :- on shutdown , pc insistes that outlook is still running and needs to force closure, as outlook was closed it can't do this so hangs in shutdown. Word cant start , as it cant scan for printers. but word editor in outlook is OK. Remote web workspace can't scan for credentials, so can't open connection to other PCs from web workspace, (remote desktop still able to find credentials and connect). Other web workspace functions Email and Intranet are OK. This problem continues when print spooler is restarted. I have noted that when the print spooler service it stopped normally although it warns the action could not be completed the service does actually stop and the dialog box Stop legend greys out, so using start will work and the print service is then OK after. Re the remote web space use of RPC and As Print spooler has dependancies which include RPC and the fairly random occurance of this issue in my laptop is there a startup sequence problem ?? Come on Microsoft this IS an issue!
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August 20th, 2011 9:02am

We have the same issues at our company and there is still no solution. It appears on all our computers but very irregularly. If someone knows a fix for this (except restarting the spooler service everytime) please let me know.
September 15th, 2011 8:58am

We did try the delayed print spooler startup, but it appears as though it is not supported? We get the following error when doing so: The delayed auto-start flag could not be set. Error 87: The parameter is incorrect.
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September 21st, 2011 5:00am

We have got a new error relating to the same fault, it seems as though this is a side effect of spooler.exe not starting correctly: Description: A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows. Problem signature: Problem Event Name: AppHangXProcB1 Application Name: explorer.exe Application Version: 6.1.7601.17567 Application Timestamp: 4d672ee4 Hang Signature: 1bca Hang Type: 129 Waiting on Application Name: spoolsv.exe:spoolss Waiting on Application Version: 0.0.0.0 OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48 Locale ID: 7177 Additional Hang Signature 1: 1bcae400f12c6eada131d14f3c9ea58f Additional Hang Signature 2: 5d52 Additional Hang Signature 3: 5d529e35c2aecc0e2df9150e4f232dc7 Additional Hang Signature 4: 5162 Additional Hang Signature 5: 5162ce924ca5aba47303b80e4821ac88 Additional Hang Signature 6: 5503 Additional Hang Signature 7: 5503511f9683f508e3c249a0bff23e69 Read our privacy statement online: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0x0409 If the online privacy statement is not available, please read our privacy statement offline: C:\Windows\system32\en-US\erofflps.txt
September 27th, 2011 1:53am

We have the same issue and also have an HP plotter. Thinking back, it is possible that this problem began occurring around the time the plotter was introduced.
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October 4th, 2011 8:17pm

We have exact the same issue. Is there anyone has solution? We don't have HP plotter. We have HP LaterJet 4350. I just asked my user not reboot computer.grace
October 4th, 2011 9:49pm

We also experience this problem on Windows 7-64Bits. Our printers are: - HP Designjet T7710ps - Xerox Phaser 7760 The problem appears randomly. It can disappear during several days and come back. The only workaround for now is: - Killing “spoolsv” process - Restart spooler service Sometimes everything works fine after a reboot. Changing the default printer has no effect. Hope that someone will find a solution or that the problem will solve itself after a future WindowsUpdate. Pierre
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October 6th, 2011 5:18am

How many of the people who are having this spooler issue that have posted in this thread are using Autodesk Revit? It sounds like a long shot, but we have noticed a pattern with users who are syncing a local file to a central model. Some times the spooler actually fails during the sync or after a reboot after syncing. User who are not working on shared models do not have the spooler "crash". User who are not using Revit, never have the spooler failer at boot or any other time.
October 19th, 2011 10:28am

Our organisation does use Revit, but the spooler issue occurs on both the systems with Revit installed and the systems without Revit installed. However, all our systems without Revit do have AutoCAD LT installed though, so all the PCs in the organisation do have some type of Autodesk products installed... Both the 32 bit and 64 bit Windows 7 clients exhibit the intermittent frozen spooler at startup issue, but the XP clients don't.
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October 21st, 2011 4:49am

hi! same here. I have the same problems as described here. I use Windows 7 Enterprise SP1, both 32 and 64 bit. We have Lexmark, Canon and Brother Printers (Drivers are up to date) which are connected to a Windows 2008 Server. I'm googling for days now and tried almost everything (including autostart the rpc-locator service and changing the printer settings to not use the spooler, i.e. send the printing jobs to the printers directly), but nothing worked. I don't have Revit or AutoCAD in use, so I don't think the problem is related to that. Perhaps it's not a printer driver issue but related to some program that is istalled. I'm not sure, but I think everything worked before I installed alle the programs (each with the most recent version): MS Office 2007 McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.8 Flash Player 11 Plugin and ActiveX Java JRE PDFCreator Scribus Opera Firefox MS Visio Viewer 2007 Notepad++ Open Office Xvid DivX iTunes (with Application Support, Application Update, QuickTime) 7zip Audacity VLC Player FileZilla FTP Client PuTTy WinSCP GIMP Skype KomoZer InkScape CDBurnerXP ImgBurn OpenProj GanttProject Adobe Reader X Irfanview KeePass 2 That's all :) Perhaps we can find the troublesome program together. I suspect McAfee and PDFCreator but didn't have time to test it, yet. I hope we can find the source of the problem soon, because that currenty prevents me from deploying Windows 7 (~50 Workstations still running WinXP) Thomas
October 31st, 2011 5:30am

Thomas, The only common programs we have with you are as follows: MS Office 2007 (and 2010) Flash Player 11 Plugin and ActiveX Java JRE 7zip Adobe Reader X
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November 8th, 2011 11:35pm

Common apps on our end are: Flash Player 11 Plugin and ActiveX Java JRE PDFCreator Opera Firefox Notepad++ iTunes (with Application Support, Application Update, QuickTime) VLC Player FileZilla FTP Client PuTTy GIMP Skype OpenProj Adobe Reader X Irfanview We have also suspected PDFCreator and even Java and flash updates that kick off after login.
November 9th, 2011 9:02am

We have this same issue on random machines. We are all Windows 7 x64, Office 2010 Pro. We have Java JRE, Flash 11, and Adobe Reader X in common with the apps you guys have. Our printers are all printing through a Windows 2008 R2 print server, with the printers assigned by GPO. This problem has been getting slowly worse. We've got Xerox and HP printers - and I see that this happens to people with other brands. So it appears to not be printer dependent. What about print driver isolation? Ours are a mix of shared and none, right now.
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November 9th, 2011 10:06am

Same Issues here. Office full of windows 7 x32. But only 2 machines are doing the following. We dont use any HP Products so I am thinking it is not a HP issue. I removed the XPS printer and rebooted 10 times and so far no error. Keeping fingers crossed. I am looking into to actually dumping the Windows\system32\spool\drivers files so we have almost zero printer drivers on the machine itself. If that all goes well for a bit I will load one printer at a time a fly that way until or of the problem reoccurs.
November 11th, 2011 9:51am

This didn't work for me. On the following reboot after making the changes suggested by Althornin the spooler hung again at startup. I tried this on a few different PC's just to make sure. :(
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November 25th, 2011 4:21am

On step 2), delete the entire HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print key That might work better. I had to make that change to resolve the issue on a few PCs here.
November 29th, 2011 8:27am

Bah, never mind, it just came back on one of those PCs I thought was fixed. The intermittent nature of this problem makes troubleshooting a real pain. I don't have a single workstation that ALWAYS experiences this issue on a reboot anymore, after applying the above "fix". However, I've got a couple that still get it some of the time.
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November 30th, 2011 8:57am

stop printer spooler service delete all printers under following keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers\Version-3 rename C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\3 (example 3.old) Start printer spooler service Add printers back one by one untill you find out which one is having problems
November 30th, 2011 9:23am

stop printer spooler service delete all printers under following keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers\Version-3 rename C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\3 (example 3.old) Start printer spooler service Add printers back one by one untill you find out which one is having problems Sure, we'll give this a shot, why not.
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December 5th, 2011 11:14am

stop printer spooler service delete all printers under following keys HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers\Version-3 rename C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\3 (example 3.old) Start printer spooler service Add printers back one by one untill you find out which one is having problems Sure, we'll give this a shot, why not. Quite a challenge when the problem doesn't show up immediately (sometimes could even take a week to show up) and users need access to all the printers every day...
December 5th, 2011 9:56pm

Getting this too. The only two printers on this PC are: Brother MFC-9970CDW - Driver Version 1.3.0.0 Brother HL-4570CDW - 1.4.0.0
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December 7th, 2011 5:02am

And this is another reason why i don't think that this has anything to do with a specific printer or printer driver (unless it is one that windows ships with, like the XPS "printer"). There are machines having this issue that have completely different sets of printers with no commonalities.
December 7th, 2011 10:13am

A question for you guys. Are any of you using scripts to remove these printers and then re-add the printers all at log on?
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December 8th, 2011 7:40am

A question for you guys. Are any of you using scripts to remove these printers and then re-add the printers all at log on? No, we push printers out via GPOs, by user.
December 8th, 2011 8:20am

A question for you guys. Are any of you using scripts to remove these printers and then re-add the printers all at log on? No, we push printers out via GPOs, by user. We have tried it via GPOs by user and also via logon script.
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December 8th, 2011 9:13pm

Upon removing the HP T2300ps plotter drivers via group policy, the problems have gone away. Even installing the T2300ps driver manually on a PC without pushing via GPO causes the problem to re-appear.
December 18th, 2011 9:34pm

I at first thought it was down to an older local printer that was using the HP Universal Print driver. The PC would boot up but not tie the driver to the printer despite using it in the past with no issues. Instead Windows would detect it as a new printer prompting to install a driver for the printer. This was ruled out though when the same issue spooler service hang occurred on a users PC who only used two Brother network printers. Still testing my users. I've asked them to delete the two network printers before they shutdown for the evening. My idea was the logon script that runs was removing and then adding the printers back in too quickly. I added a wait command of 4 seconds but it hasn't helped. Still waiting for feedback but I have had positive replies so far.
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December 19th, 2011 12:18pm

Uncheck Enable Bidirectional on the Ports tab of the printer properties on the machine sharing the printer. The HP language monitor needs access to a resource that only the local administrator has. When you restart the spooler the jobs are scheduled in system context rather than the users context.
December 22nd, 2011 5:45am

Uncheck Enable Bidirectional on the Ports tab of the printer properties on the machine sharing the printer. The HP language monitor needs access to a resource that only the local administrator has. When you restart the spooler the jobs are scheduled in system context rather than the users context. I don't see how this can possibly be the solution: I've got multiple users, with the same user rights, on machines made from a common image, using the same printers - and only a few of them have the issue in this thread. I can't see how the above would only affect a few users in this case. In addition, we've got people above who have the same issue even with no HP printers installed.
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December 23rd, 2011 11:50pm

I am seeing this also. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. Word 2010. I have made a habit now of checking my printers and devices each time i boot up, if they aren't there I restart the bluetooth services and reboot until the printers show up. I take my PC into many different clients offices, so am continually linking into different networks. When the printers don't show up, Outlook won't shut down, I cannot print or save in Word/Excel and RDP sessions won't end properly. This is a time consuming problem. If there has been a solution since these posts that someone is aware of, I'd love to know! Diann Fariss
January 5th, 2012 8:16am

Hi, I am also experiencing this issue with a client. Although it's mainly on laptops that have a Bluetooth module installed. Have found this fix via MS but unable to download that actual patch itself. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2486635 Think we may have to resort to removing printer drivers and install them one by one to find the problematic printer (if related!).
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January 14th, 2012 8:31am

I was having the same issues in that the 'Devices and Printers' console not showing the printers and just hanging. Finally manage to resolve the issue, it was down to the printers being installed on the server and then shared via active directory. We had a label printer which is connected to a usb-ethernet print server. Once I removed that printer and associated drivers the console would display. I would make sure that the drivers used are the correct drivers for the printer, am only saying this as when installing the printer the driver from the Windows Update site was being used to deploy the drivers instead of the locally installed ones. Would recommend you remove all printers and drivers and then complete the following: 1. First I removed printer in "Devices and Printers" 2. Then I stopped print spooler 3. In registry I opened HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Print Processors\ 4. I renamed all Print Processors that were listed. Like Winprint to Winprint.old, Hpcpp107 to Hpcpp107.old, and so on ... 5. I started print spooler 6. Removed problematic driver pack using printui /s /t2 from a command line with admin rights. 7. Reopened registry location HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Print Processors\ 8. Renamed back all Print Processors to original name. Like Winprint.old to Winprint, Hpcpp107.old to Hpcpp107, and so on ... 9. Restart print spooler 10. Installed new printer drivers 11. Tested printing Try then installing printer drivers one by one to see if the Devices and Printers window hangs again...
January 17th, 2012 4:14am

The problem is evident here on my home network. On my Win 7 Pro 64-bit installation, most times after a boot, no printers are available in the "Devices and Printers" window, and you cannot print from any software application (the application freezes up if you try to print). Stopping the print spooler and then starting it again, and then refreshing the "Devices and Printers" window populates it with all installed printers, and all then print normally. And yes, the problem is intermittent -- about 20% of the time, the machine will boot with the printers available and working. The same printers are installed on another machine using Win 7 Home Premium 32-bit, and the problem has not shown up there.
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January 26th, 2012 11:19am

Hello Canuck Two things I did with a client who was experiencing the same issues; 1) Update the printer drivers on the affected PC, the spooler queries the network and therefore is unable to find all devices and thus the spooler hangs. 2) Remove all printer drivers as explained above, you need to ensure no printer drivers exist on the PC/laptop. If the issue is still occuring then like I did for the problematic printer was to install it as a local printer then create a new port and map that to the printer. Someone above has explained that they did this too. In our case it was because of a hub that is on the network and causing issues, installing the printer this way seem to fix the issue.
January 27th, 2012 3:29am

We are having the same issue in our corporate office. Checked the event logs on a few machines and it seems to start around Nov. 2011. We thought it's the Adobe Acrobat prof/standard were the cause. Isolated the Adobe PDF printer driver and that appeared to fix the issue at the moment. After a reboot, the issue came back. it happens randomly on certain users. We have replaced user's computers, re-created user profiles, etc.. None has worked. After reboot, some users lost all network printers. Restarted the print spooler and re-added one of the network printers and then all of network printers (previously mapped) started to show up. It would work in that state until the machine rebooted.
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February 16th, 2012 11:27am

Having the same problem, print spooler is creating a huge headache. I posted here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprogeneral/thread/f1628649-bb63-4c82-81b3-05e6c28ef971 but then reading this thread I thought I'd refer to my post as well as this seems to be a very well known issue but with no resolution.
February 21st, 2012 12:52pm

I have a customer with the same problems mentioned in this thread - No printers are shown - Word/Excel won't start/open documents properly - AutoCAD won't start correctly - .vbs login script won't finish This usually happens at login after a reboot but some get problems while being logged in. The affected computers are a mix of HP Desktops and Lenovo Notebooks who all run Windows 7 64bit, we also have a variety of computers with Windows XP and Vista 32bit who are not affected at this point. Most of the users are using Microsoft Office 2007 and a few run 2010. Outlook 2007/2010 and Lync 2010 uses Office 365 for messaging. Some of them are running AutoCAD in different versions from 2008 and onwards. The antivirus software is Trendmicro Worry Free Business Security Advanced 6.0 SP3. The printer devices are a mix of HP and Oce large format printers, HP laser printers and Sharp Digital Copiers and the print server is running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 64bit. We used to install/connect the printers in a login script but have removed that but problem still occurs.
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February 22nd, 2012 4:53am

We are also having this problem, Device and Printers does not load and just sit there with a green loading bar. Microsoft Outlook 2010 also freezes. I have tried: Setting Bluetooth services to Automatic (as someone suggested) updated all drivers and software on the computer (HP Elite 6450p laptop) Disabling startup items and running as a clean bootup Ran Virus scan (just in case it was something stupid like that) I have also tried a few other things but nothing seems to work... The one thing i have noticed is if i restart the computer without the network cable plugged in and log into the computer everything will work (so i plug the network cable back in and everything is sweet until the next time the computer is restarted again) It is getting quite frustrating to troubleshoot such a problem.
February 22nd, 2012 11:24pm

Is SP1 installed on all client computers that are having this problem? In my customers environment we have 19 W7 SP1 and 3 W7 and I haven't heard any problems reported from the ones without SP1.
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February 24th, 2012 3:47am

we having the same problem in our network on windows 7 32/64 bit machines with and without sp1 installed. we could trigger the problem by uninstall the hp designjet T2300 driver. Uninstall -> no problem. Install -> problem. actual there was a driverupdate from microsoft among the optional windows updates. maybe the solution for the t2300 plotter...
February 24th, 2012 11:41am

with the new hp driver the problem is solved
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March 18th, 2012 6:11am

i read the old thread and i can add something ... this probleme started a thurday morning after windows update is applicated from my windows update server ... i do a system restore ... and all working good for a long time after that time ... i restart windows update and the probleme come back i mount a new pc with a fresh windows without any update and test it 2 week without problem ... but after put all the update problem is back ... i have hp brother and canon on network .... i now i remove all defaut printer to see if happen again ... but its hard to tell because its random ... but im almost sure a windows update cause this.... and its before holidays ... like in november or december ... but im not sure on the date in 20 years of tecnical support this one its very hard to find ... and i will find it ... the question is when lol and ty kevin i will use it ... the time i find the true bug the funny part in this bug ... i have half my users in 64 bits that dont have the problem and have the office 2010 too
June 29th, 2012 10:23pm

can we have some microsoft to help on that im very good to find a problem but not im starting to think i will never find it i removed all driver try it 1 by one ... try another printer company ... i think its more with office problem after a update but witch one i never find it ... i restart a new computer from scrach and try to updating patch 1 by one but the random with this error kill me maybe with windows 8 this will be fixed but how i explain this to my user and my customer? ... in 20 years i always find a solution but simple printer im stuck ?
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July 25th, 2012 1:20pm

I was having this issue, and it turned out to be a driver issue with our HP plotters. An updated driver came out, and the issue has now gone away completely. I really didn't think it would end up being a driver problem (too many people having the issue, with no commonalities on printers, but that is what resolved it for us.
July 25th, 2012 1:25pm

hi everyone...tossing my laptop in the hat here, similar issue when I boot...sometimes I won't be able to load "Devices and Printers" until I restart Print Spooler. This can be streaky an happen for 10-15 reboots in a row, and then clear up for a few days. Seems to occur more frequently when I switch networks. Windows 7 64 Pro, Lenovo T510, Office 2007 My only workaround is to try to stop print spooler service, let it error out, then start it clean. I've noticed that after sometime of running clean, it can go bad again, at which point I again apply the workaround. This has been happening to me since I began using this laptop...Jan 2012 or so. Previous laptop I don't recall having experience the issue. Will bookmark this thread and post if I dig something up. Hopefully someone from MS will notice us here and can collect various traces and dumps from us for analysis.
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August 7th, 2012 1:57am

i find the problem for me its the brother driver 2245 i try it all and since the new driver its not working good i installer pcl 5 driver and seem to be stable i avised brother
August 13th, 2012 1:05pm

We have an end user who took detailed notes about what they were doing before the print spooler crash (He was trying to print from Outlook 2010). We reimaged the laptop and the issue went away, however, when we tried to print an email from Outlook: PRINT SPOOLER LOCK UP. Is the issue at all related to printing from Office on Windows 7? Correlation or causation? We need to keep this thread going until we can all find a solution, because it is driving us absolutely crazy. I know others viewing this thread are feeling the same way.
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August 14th, 2012 12:35pm

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