Hi!
We have a Windows Server 2012 R2 as a dedicated print management server.
We rely on the universal PCL drivers from Ricoh, Lexmark and HP. It has all the latest Windows Updates and seems to work flawlessly.
Whenever we update the universal drivers for the printers, however, it causes some rather irritating issues for some of our Windows workstations for some reason. Interestingly, this problem occurs more frequently on Windows 7 than Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, who
usually downloads and replaces the new drivers without any troubles.
The message you receive on our Windows 7 machines (and some of our 8:s) after updating the drivers on the print server are e.g.
Windows can not connect to the printer 0x00000057
The only way we know to fix this issue is to remove the old driver from C:\Windows\System32\spool and the corresponding registry keys under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments. Only then can we connect to the printer again in order to
receive the new drivers. Worst part is, we have to do this for every workstation every time the printer driver is updated.
My question is: why does this happen and how can we prevent it from happening?
Is there an issue with our GPO that doesn't allow some computers to download new drivers? Do we have some wrong setting on our print server? Any thoughts/recommendations is greatly appreciated.