Had a workstation that would regularly lose connection with connected printers, so checked the Windows services. Found that the Print Spooler terminated and would repeatedly do so even when restarted. Checked the Event Logs and found that there were several instances of Event ID 7031 – Print Spooler Terminated Unexpectedly corresponding with the Services stopping.
Fix Print Spooler terminated via the registry:
- Open regedit (e.g. click Start, type regedit and press Enter)
- Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows NT x86\Drivers
or
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers
depending on your OS
- Under this key, there will either be the keys Version-2 and Version-3 or both
- The sub-keys under these contain the printer driver configuration information, so delete all the sub-keys under Version-2 and Version-3, but not these keys themselves
- Restart the Print Spooler service and test printing
If your company is having issues with Print Spooler terminated events or needs help troubleshooting network printers, then contact us for assistance.
Here are a couple more ideas to help:
1. Open command prompt as administrator
2. Type – sc stop spooler
3. Type – del C:\WINDOWS\System32\spool\PRINTERS\*.* /s /q
4. Type – sc start spooler
5. Type – sc config spooler depend=RPCSS