How to cancel printing or to delete a print job that is stuck in the print queue in Windows XP

[Alan Morris [MSFT]]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946737

the group that wrote this is pretty proud. Most of you will just start at
method 4 since you already performed the first 3 methods.


I'll take a minute and explain why a job gets stuck. Uninterested parties
just follow the link.

Jobs get a reference count associated with them from the spooler and the
driver components (print processors and language monitor primarily). When a
reference gets incremented without a decrement, the job will still have a
reference and the spooler will not delete the job until the component which
incremented the count performs the decrement function. If the decrement
function never arrives or takes a long time from the function, the job sits
in the queue in a deleting state while the spooler waits for the reference
count to reach 0.

Yes I know, you want to just delete the dang job, you don't care that some
process out there is supposed to manipulate the job to signal the spooler
that it's done and ready for deletion.



--
Alan Morris
Windows Printing Team
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base here:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[soscc]

i followed the instructions in the kb, and the jobs are still in the queue.
checking the folder before running the script didn't show any of the files
referred to in the script. the printer is attached to a linux sme pc via
samba. the print jobs don't show up on that system either.

i can't delete the printer when there are jobs queued, so that isn't an
option.

when trying to delete the job from within the print queue window i get
either an error processing command or access denied. looking up either of
these in the support database brings up all kinds of things that aren't
related to printing.

any other ideas?

 

[Alan Morris [MSFT]]

The instructions are for canceling jobs for a local printer. I do not know
where linux stores the print files

--
Alan Morris
Windows Printing Team
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base here:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

[soscc]

the print jobs aren't on the linux pc. i have another xp pc that uses the
same printer and those jobs don't show up in it's queue. it seems to be on
just this computer.

 

[soscc]

any idea why the jobs just show up on 1 pc of the 2 that access the same
printer that is on the linux system? is there another place on the pc where
the jobs might be queue'd? a registry entry perhaps?

 

[Shawnk]

I need some serious help. I was printing invitations last night and I got
all of them, however, this morning I went to print a document and it won't
print. In the print que it's showing that it's trying to delete a job from
last night at 8:30ish. How do I get rid of this?

 

[Alan Morris [MSFT]]

Is the job still there after deleting the files as instructed?

--
Alan Morris
Windows Printing Team
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base here:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.