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Afternoon all,

PCs within my organisation are getting stuck on applying the printer GPO we have set up. This happened a few months back and a restart of the print server resolved the issue but it has now started to occur again.

The issue doesn’t seem to be related to a specific printer’s drivers as I pushed out the devices individually and all of them caused the same issue.

Just wanted to see if anyone else had come across this issue and had a potential solution?

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I think that since the restart temporarily solved the issue that there is definitley something underlying that might need a more perma solution. Look at the Event Viewer on the PCs that are failing to apply the printer GPO to try and get some more specific errors.

I would also make sure that there are no network issues affecting the connectivity between your client PCs and the domain controllers or print servers.

You could temporarily configure the GPO to deploy fewer printers or use a different method of printer deployment like via a login script to see if this helps.

2 Spice ups
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Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the swift response.

Going to export current services and then compare to the updated services after the restart.

I did test deploying one printer at a time but the issue persisted regardless of the printer being deployed.

Worth noting that on the print server, “Print management” doesn’t open at all. Surely this is related to the issue?

1 Spice up
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can you manually add a printer by just going to Run and typing \printservername?

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Unfortunately not, we have that option disabled for users.

I can re-enable and then test?

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yep, i would verify it works manually first, if it does, then you can focus on the GPO. But if it does not, then it wont matter what you do with the GPO because it is not the issue.

2 Spice ups
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There is a printer cache registry key that needs to be deleted, it took me hours to find it and I’m going through my old notes now trying to find it. I’ll post again once I find it. I believe it’s a very common issue that few people know about, they end up uninstalling printers or rebuilding the RDS when it’s just a simple reg key that needs to be deleted, and yes it will eventually happen again.

“This issue occurs because the RDS server caches client information for each user and printer in the Client Side Rendering Print Provider registry key when a client user connects to the RDS server by using network printer connections. These registry entries are not deleted when the client user disconnects from the server, and they become stale if the user never logs on again.”

We need to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider registry key in the RDS server

  1. Open Registry Editor (Windows Key + R, then type in regedit)
  2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider
  3. Delete the target registry key.

You’re welcome :slight_smile: