Deleted printers keeps coming back - and multiply

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My users are on 2012 R2 RDS Session Host servers. I've used "Deploy Printers" (from Print Manager) to deploy 4 printers. The last week, I've had a lot of problems where users can't print. If I deleted the printer and added it again, they could print just fine. Now I've removed all printer deploying from GPO - and I have no printers in any login scripts. I did a gpupdate /force, but all the 4 printers are now listed 3 times. If I delete the printers and log off and back on, all the printers are popping up again. Sigh! This is driving me nuts. This script doesn't show any of the "SVFREJA" printers.

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2") Set colPrinters = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * From Win32_Printer") If colPrinters.Count <> 0 Then 'If there are some network printers Dim s s = "" For Each objPrinterInstalled In colPrinters ' For each network printer s = s + objPrinterInstalled.Name + chr(13) Next msgbox s End if

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It gives me this result. (sry for the big picture) My problem is not with the "redirected" printers, my problem is that I have several printers with the same name (on SVFREJA) and I can't get rid of them. Any idea why I can't get rid of the "ophaned" printers??

group-policy
windows-server-2012
remote-desktop
windows-server-2012-r2
printer

asked Jun 10, 2014 at 19:04 529 9 9 gold badges 13 13 silver badges 25 25 bronze badges

8 Answers 8

I had this exact same problem. After I deleted a Group Policy printers kept coming back all over the place.

The only solution for me was:

Downloading PSTools
Running CMD as administrator
Run the command psexec -i -s c:\windows\regedit.exe (make sure you don't have regedit open already, otherwise it gives an error)
Delete all keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM which contained the printer name that keeps coming back.

You have to use the PStools option, because otherwise you will get an access denied error when deleting the regkeys.

18.4k 10 10 gold badges 60 60 silver badges 110 110 bronze badges answered May 13, 2015 at 7:47 Herman Brood Herman Brood 131 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges this was exactly was I did to resolve the same issue. Commented Sep 28, 2017 at 21:41

We had a ton of printers (like ~100) showing up for everyone logging into an RDS host, and we hadn't deployed most of them via Group Policy anywhere at any point in time. We're wondering if it wasn't because we cloned a server and did a sysprep to build the RDS host. At any rate, this regedit was the solution for us as well, thanks much!

Commented Jan 17, 2020 at 17:07 See "Credit to Herman Brood and Benjamin Chan. " post below Commented May 19, 2022 at 16:13

Looking to see if you found a solution. I'm running into the exact same issue. Definately not redirected printers.

If I look at the events I can see - Kernal-PnP:

One minute later: Device SWD\PRINTENUM was configured.

Driver Name: PrintQueue.inf Class Guid: Driver Date: 06/21/2006 Driver Version: 6.3.9600.16384 Driver Provider: Microsoft Driver Section: NO_DRV Driver Rank: 0xFF0000 Matching Device Id: PRINTENUM\PrinterConnection Outranked Drivers: oem10.inf:lptenum\zebra_technologiesztf670:00FF0001 oem14.inf:lptenum\zebra_technologiesztf670:00FF0001 c_swdevice.inf:SWD\GenericRaw:00FF3001 Device Updated: false

Hate having to dive into the registry but it looks like going into the Client Side Rending Print Provider keys under the HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\ and cleaning out anywhere there s a reference to the persistent "zombie" printers.

answered Jun 27, 2014 at 8:14 Benjamin Chan Benjamin Chan 31 2 2 bronze badges See "Credit to Herman Brood and Benjamin Chan. " post below Commented May 19, 2022 at 16:13

Those are printers being redirected from the local computers of the users who have sessions on the RDS server. Those ARE NOT local printers on the RDS server. If you don't want those printers to be redirected from the local computers to the RDS server then disable Printer Redirection on the RDS server.

answered Jun 10, 2014 at 20:05 111k 6 6 gold badges 82 82 silver badges 173 173 bronze badges

I'm sorry for not making myself clear. My problem is not with the printers with (redirected) . my problem is that I have 3 printers called "HAD - Print 1 på SVFREJA", 4 printers called "TAA - Print 1 på SVFREJA" and 3 printers called "TAA - Print 2 på SVFREJA" . it's kinda like ophaned printers, but I can't remove them.

Commented Jun 10, 2014 at 20:12

Had this exact problem and drove me crazy for over a week. To resolve this issue install the Printer Management role (or Printer and Document Service) on the session host.

answered Sep 28, 2017 at 20:52 11 1 1 bronze badge

This steps worked for me:
Open "Administrative Tools", then "Print Management"
Select "All Printers" -Find the printer in question -the status will be something like "Deleting - Offline" and there was 1 pending job. I right-clicked, selected "Cancel All Jobs", and the printer immediately disappeared.

answered Mar 25, 2017 at 8:16 133 5 5 bronze badges

I ran into this once on some workstations that had been imaged with an older Kaspersky imaging server. Ended up building a completely brand new Kaspersky image. Nothing else we did would permanently remove the printers.

Is it possible that your server has gone through one or more OS upgrades?

answered Sep 8, 2017 at 0:42 303 3 3 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges

Credit to @Herman Brood and @Benjamin Chan, here are the instructions that resolved the issue for me (a merge of what both mentioned above):

Anything under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM seems to be derived from errant references within HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\ and/or HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\ which therefore need to be deleted to cure the issue.

Find the errant queues in Device Manager. Since I've fixed the issue, I don't have them anymore, but as an example, refer to the "Location" in the "General" tab of each errant queue:

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For me, the location said something similar to:

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Download PSTools
Run CMD as administrator
Run the command psexec -i -s c:\windows\regedit.exe (make sure you don't have regedit open already, otherwise it gives an error. The -s switch allows you to impersonate SYSTEM, which is necessary for permission to delete these keys from the registry.)
Delete all keys under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\ which contain each "Location" determined above.
Delete all keys under HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\ which contain each "Location" determined above (I didn't have any, likely because everything is 64 bit).
Uninstall the errant Print Queues:
Cycle the Print Spooler and cross your fingers. Printers should not return (they didn't for me).

As an aside, deleting keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM seems to work similar (if not equivalent) to uninstalling the queue from Device Manager. If the keys under HKLM\Software[\Wow6432Node]\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\ aren't deleted, the errant queues return.