Printer Queue

[Guest]

Is there any way to clear the printer queue?
I can clear all the spooled items except the first one which is supposed to
be "Deleting - Printing".

The only method I have found is to reboot.

Any idea as to what causes this hangup?

 

[Tom Ferguson]

You can try manually removing the failed spooler files from the spool
directory. This usually clears the problem. Needless to say, if the
problem re-appears frequently, there is something awry.

Navigate to
<windows directory>\System\spool\printers
and delete every file found there.

Exit out. Restart Windows. Try printing.

Tom
MSMVP
Windows Shell/User

 

[Guest]

Hi Tom,
I just had this same problem, and your direction was the beginning, but I
was not able to delete the spool file, since the system claimed it to be in
use causing a catch 22. Here's what I did on my Windows XP system from the
administrator account (forgive the hack, but it did work) :

1) On the Task Manager, click on the "Processes" tab, then click on "Name"
to alphabetize on name of process. Click on "spoolsv.exe", and press the
delete key, then continue through the message that says your aren't supposed
to delete individual processes.

2) Once the process was deleted, the spool files were no longer "in use",
and deleting the files
C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS\*
was allowed.

3) Reboot, so the process I killed would be restored. Printed a test page.
(Before I was simply not able to print at all because of the job stuck in the
queue).

The reason this was probably so hard for me was that I was goofing around
and tried to print something from Cygwin (a sort of Linux shell, which runs
directly in Windows -- its a free product). This was probably why I hosed my
print queue.