Spooler Service Stopping Randomly

[M Hines]

We have a Windows 2000 Server installed as our primary F/P
server it is running 2000 sp4 with a couple of hotfixes
for terminal services problems and the print spooler
randomly stops functioning. No real reason and it may not
happen one day and ten times the next. We have all HP
printers and Jet-Direct cards and we are using the latest
firmware and drivers for those devices. Sometimes it
happens when we are printing and sometimes it happens when
the printers are idle. We can go back in and start the
service and everything is fine. It ran for months without
a problem then out of the blue the spooler starts
hanging. Any thoughts.....

M

 

[Key Bank Network Engineer]

Any hint of the Bugbear virus around the time of the
spooler problem offset?

 

[Guest]

Our server scans everyday for viruses and since the problems began I rechecked everything and forced additional virus scans of the server. There is no indiciation of bugabear on the server. We recently turned off HP Web JetAdmin Service and the World Wide Web Publishing Service. This has stopped the frequency of the spooler service going down, but we continue to have unexplained stoppage of the service at least twice a day.

 

[drt]

Does it "hang" or does it just disappear? If it is stopping (e.g. spoolsv
process goes away, Print Spooler service shows not started), do you have dr.
watson set up to take a user dump when a process has an access violation?
The dr. watson log and/or user dump can provide some clues in finding out
why and how often your spooler is croaking. If you can't find drwtsn32.log
or user.dmp on your system drive, you can set it up as shown below. You
should get an drwatson event in the application event log when it dies.
Support should be able to help interpret these files.

You might want to go into system setup\services and set the spooler to
restart itself automatically if it goes down if availability is an issue.

The auto key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows
nt\currentversion\aedebug needs to be set to 1. run drwtsn32 from start\run
and set it up to write a full dump to the system folder (here's what the
registry would look like).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\drwatson
NumberOfCrashes REG_DWORD 0xa
WaveFile REG_SZ
DumpSymbols REG_DWORD 0x0
DumpAllThreads REG_DWORD 0x1
AppendToLogFile REG_DWORD 0x1
VisualNotification REG_DWORD 0x0
SoundNotification REG_DWORD 0x0
CreateCrashDump REG_DWORD 0x1
CrashDumpType REG_DWORD 0x2
Instructions REG_DWORD 0xa
MaximumCrashes REG_DWORD 0x0
LogFilePath REG_SZ c:\windows
CrashDumpFile REG_SZ c:\windows\user.dmp

drwtsn32 -i sets everythig back to defaults (sticking it in \windows (or
\winnt) just makes it easier to find )

d