Windows 2000 Printing Problem

[roback]

I have a printing problem. I use a simple visual basic program to do
some billing for my office. I went to print a form out of it this
morning and did not put in a specific date range to print. Instead of a
blank form, pages and pages of random printer/printing information
started to pour out of my printer. I tried to print a word doc just to
see if it was a os issue or program specific, and it did the same thing.
I don't understand it. Is there some kind of endless loop spool file
that no matter what I try to print now gets sent to my printer??? What
do I do? I tried unplugging the connections from the printer and
rebooting with no avail. The only thing that rebooting and turning the
compuer off does is stops the paper from pouring out, but when I go to
print something it starts up again. Please help if you can!

 

[John John]

I have a printing problem. I use a simple visual basic program to do
some billing for my office. I went to print a form out of it this
morning and did not put in a specific date range to print. Instead of a
blank form, pages and pages of random printer/printing information
started to pour out of my printer. I tried to print a word doc just to
see if it was a os issue or program specific, and it did the same thing.
I don't understand it. Is there some kind of endless loop spool file
that no matter what I try to print now gets sent to my printer??? What
do I do? I tried unplugging the connections from the printer and
rebooting with no avail. The only thing that rebooting and turning the
compuer off does is stops the paper from pouring out, but when I go to
print something it starts up again. Please help if you can!

Purge the print spooler, to do so at a command prompt issue the
following commands, pressing enter after each line:

NET STOP SPOOLER
cd %systemroot%\SYSTEM32\spool\PRINTERS
del *.spl
del *.shd
NET START SPOOLER

That will delete ALL the print jobs.

You can make a small batch file to do the above job, MVP Pegasus
freguently posts this little batch file to do the job:

@echo off
echo.
echo Purging the print queue . . .
net stop Spooler
echo Deleting all print jobs . . .
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
del /q %SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start Spooler
echo Done!
ping localhost -n 4 > nul

Adding the ping commands gives the service a bit of additional time to
be stopped and started.

John