Intermittent Frozen Application when printing

[James Arthurs]

Environment

 

We have approximately 500 users spread out across 51 locations, running on 75 different Citrix Desktops.  The bulk of the users are utilizing Thin Clients and are load balanced across 50 desktops that are provisioned each night with the same image.  We are not currently saving the Event Logs of these desktops to long term storage, so the previous day's logs are not available.

 

Our environment essentially has one model of B&W printing, but the issue also occurs with the Color printers.  Printers were deployed 14 months ago.  Until last week the print drivers that had been installed during the deployment are the same drivers we were running.  Last week I installed new drivers on a Client machine. Unintentionally those drivers were grabbed by the print server and then passed down to all of the other client systems.

 

Desktops running Server 2008 R2 x64

Applications: Happens with a variety of applications (Office, Excel, IE, Foxit), primarily 32 bit apps.

Print Server: Server 2008 R2 x64

 

Issue

 

A user will go to print from an application and the application will freeze.  Nothing appears in the print queue, and the C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS folder.

 

Often times, if another user that is also on that same server attempts to print they will also become frozen.  There are instances where another user is able to print without an issue.

 

When we have two users that are frozen, if we unfreeze one of the users, it tends to result in both users becoming unfrozen.

 

If a user is able to wait a length of time (10 minutes) the system will unfreeze and print the job.  It is unclear whether this is due to another user in the system encountering an issue and had killed their application to escape the frozen status.

 

Suggestion on how to troubleshoot this?

 

 

 

 

 

[Peter Dickason1709151723]

Don't you love Windows 2008 thinking you're too stupid to manage your own servers and automatically install print drivers without question?  What you're going to have to do is remove the offending driver from all of your servers then what we do is implement printer mapping rules to use a different driver when this one is called to try to prevent it from being pulled in.  It's painful tho.  I read an article somewhere that with the new Windows 2008 printer subsystem that this automatic installation behavior cannot be turned off.  >:(

 

Hope this helps.

Pete

[James Arthurs]

We 429 different printers configured on the print server, many of them are duplicates with just different Default settings.  Allowing a user to print to the "Letterhead" printer when needing to print to Letterhead, rather than knowing that they have to change the Tray setting on a printer.

 

Removal of the print drivers from the Print Server will result in us loosing all of the specially configured printers.  I wish I could identify the offending printer driver, and then I'd need to find a non-offending one.  The issue is occurring apparently no matter the printer that is being printed to, to include virtual ones, such as Foxit.

 

This company has been operating this way for years (I've been here for 2 months), this freezing issue only cropped up within the past 6 months.  In the last month the annoyance factor has risen to the point that it is now a priority issue.

[Peter Dickason1709151723]

Hi James,

 

The job you have of finding the offending driver is a painful one.  Citrix has a tool called StressPrinters to help weed out weak drivers.    

 

https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX129574

 

Plus if you google 'finding the bad printer driver in citrix' you will find lots of references to help you in your troubleshooting.

 

hope this helps.

 

Pete

[hiten pankhania]

I REALLY HOPE THIS HELPS SOMEONE - AS I HAVE SEEN SEVERAL POSTS THAT COME CLOSE BUT DID NOT FIX THE PROBLEM OF HUNDREDS OF GREYED OUT PRINTERS.

I'm not exactly sure where the problem arose but we seem to get this on newly imaged 2012 r2 servers running Citrix Xenapp 7.6.  Rebuilding the servers is probably the correct thing to do, but id already spent too much time trying to solve this so will paste my findings.  Also what I believe to be a good workaround or fix.

Fixing the duplicate and ghost printers.

1. Export or Backup the key below (note* this key will have the hundreds of printers, redirected etc. You will need a couple items from this key to copy and paste later, minus those pesky printers).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider]

a. From the backup copy this setting.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider]

"RemovePrintersAtLogoff"=dword:00000000

2. Delete the Key - Client Side Rendering Print Provider

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider]

3. Recreate the key - Client Side Rendering Print Provider Key

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider]

4. The next step requires full access to the registry so you will need PSEXEC.exe from(sysinternals). in order to the add the key back in below you may need to use PSEXEC and also create .reg files - some example shown below - start with "Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00"

Create a reg file containing the settings below, using PSEXEC from a command prompt run this reg file.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider]
"RemovePrintersAtLogoff"=dword:00000000

5. Delete the PRINTENUM (key, only PRINTENUM) from location below (make a backup first, you will the hundreds of printers in here also).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM]

6. Create a reg file with the lines below are import this ( these lines can be taken out of the backup you created).

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM\PrintQueues\Properties]

You have now restored to a default state - however when you reboot you will receive all the these printers in a greyed out state. you can either manually delete the 200+ printers or delete the same settings in the backup of the alternate registries - ControlSet001 and ControlSet002

So now follow the same steps as above but for the registry keys below

7. Delete the Key

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM]

Recreate the Key under ControlSet002

PRINTENUM

8. Do the same for – ControlSet001 if present.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM]

Recreate the Key under ControlSet001

PRINTENUM

9. Lastly add the keys below back

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM\PrintQueues\Properties]

Do this for ControlSet001.

10. Reboot and problem should be gone.

 

 

[Christian Bill]

@JArthurs: Did you find any solution for youre problem? We are facing similar problems with terminal server (w2k16). thanks for a reply