Printer Problems

Warning: Geek stuff

I have two laser printers in my office: an inexpensive Samsung B/W and an inexpensive Dell color. I use them both on my Microsoft Vista Home desktop machine. Most of my print jobs are sent to the Samsung B/W, because it is cheaper. I save the Dell color output for fancy things. This arrangement has worked fine over the last three years. Until last week.

I was reading an interesting newsletter on a web site. It contained text and images. I wanted a copy to read and study later. So decided to use the Dell color printer. Immediately after sending the print request, I received an error window saying "spooler subsystem app crash" and my printer stopped. I closed the error window and it came back 30 seconds later. OK, I was low on time, so I decided to send the print job to the B/W machine. Nada. I got the same error message.

Well, this was all I needed on a Friday afternoon! So I quickly went through the "standard" troubleshoot and repair steps:

• Reboot Microsoft Windows. Both printers continued to fail.
• Isolate the offenting printer. I turned both off, rebooted, and turned them on, one at a time. The problem appeared as soon as I turned on the Dell color machine.
• Update the printer drivers from Microsoft. No updates.
• Try the Microsoft Printer Repair Tool. Nope
• Go to the Dell site and download the newest drivers for my machine. After installation, including a firware update, I still had the "spooler subsystem app crash" message and printer freeze.
• Physically isolate the printers from the desktop machine and reboot. When the B/W machine was the only printer connected, no problem. As soon as I connect the color printer, the errors started up.

Well, so much for the "standard" troubleshooting. It was time to shut the office down and go home to a beer! Over the weekend, I did some searching for the phrase "spooler subsystem app crash." The majority of solutions pointed to junk files left over in the print queue.

It's not so easy to clean out the print queue.

Windows (and Mac and Linux too, I believe) takes the document to the printed, be it web page or letter page or photograph, and converts the information into a special file and puts it in the print spooler folder.

c:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS\

The driver for the selected printer reads the file and processes it for the laser and inkjets to form an image on paper. Once the data are delivered to the selected machine and there are no errors, the file in the print spool is deleted and all is right with the world.

My files were scrambled. The printer couldn't use them. So it tied again and again until it gave up. But those bad files continued to say, "Eat me."

So I went to c:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS\ and trashed both of the files in there. I emptied the trash, rebooted Windows, connected both printers, and all was well.

Yea!