If you have ever seen this error (or any other printer or spooler error) and don’t know what to do about it, fear no more.
Windows cannot connect to the printer. the local print spooler service is not running. please restart the spooler or restart the machine.
Also, I have seen a printer magically disappear from the computer even though it is connected and powered on.
There is a great little fix for both of these scenarios. It is called PrintFlush. The utility is a simple batch file that you download and then run. Download it here:
Download PrintFlush from Brad Kovach.
If you are really interested in what the batch file does, keep reading.
First, it stops the print spooler
net stop spooler
Next, configures the spooler (very important for Lexmark printers)
sc config spooler depend= RPCSS
Then it flushes the spooler
del /Q /F /S “%systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers\*.*”
Lastly, it restarts the spooler
net start spooler
I have used this utility many times has gotten me out of multiple printer jams.
Worked Great! and only took a small amount of time to download, extract and run.
Thanks
Your the best thanks so much, saved me lots of time:)
Thanks, works great.
It’s a miracle! I’ve tried a million things, including Microsoft support, and this was the only thing that worked. Thank you!!
The scenario, which has been metioned above exactly is happening to my machine and even i run the batch file yet it is not rectified the problem.
pls giv a solution for the same. the os is server 2003
thank you so much…you’re a genius!
Struggled for hours with this!!!
Well done mate – it worked a treat.
So simple, yet nobody could help – not even HP Cutomer Support who insisted I uninstall and reinstall drivers.
Give that man a drink!
Satish Kumar : Its really great solution. It fixed my issue which I was facing for last 2 months. Thanks a lot.
Brad, I have been doing this for years but never needed to include the service config command for RPC, it has always been there as a dependency. Have you found it missing lots? Any idea what caused it?
My print icon in the task bar insists on the fact that there are 3 docs in the queue, yet these are no where to be found including the spool/printers dir. This happened after connecting to an RDP session over VPN, the problem was the tunnels were closed for the VPN session and the printer was a NW printer so while the VPN was active the printer could not be reached. After closing the VPN some documents printed. Each item printed resulted in three items in the print queue.
This is a bit esoteric but since you have posted I figured I would check as I am guessing even the MS MVPs would have trouble with this one.
Thanks.
Jason