Windows 7 and printing to network printers

For a while now we have been upgrading all our systems to Windows 7. For the most part it has been fairly pain free and without major issues. For the last few days however we have run into a problem that seemed to be rather major.

When printing to the network a workstation would just, well, not print. Rather annoying when really this is pretty simple and straight forward in most cases. At first a right issue was thought to be the culprit as we have rather stringent limitations set for the regular users to prevent bad things from happening. (limited rights and security are generally a big deal with me) But after doing some troubleshooting that turned out to not be the case.

What ended up being the culprit was a simple case of version compatibility. To wit our printers are still hosted on a Windows 2k3 server (not for long but for now). With Windows 7 having introduced a new print queueing process (called Async RPC) to speed up things it was not playing nicely with the printer server. Making the problem more frustrating was the randomness of it all. Some would work fine, others (more so one in particular) would almost constantly foul up. Making you think that the problem was that workstation in particular instead of a more general problem.

The answer was eventually found here: Windows 7 Printing sends a Local Downlevel Document and will NOT Print so I can't claim to be the fount of all wisdom (but at least lucky in my searches). The key point though is that you need to add the following to a system's registry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers]
"EnabledProtocols"=dword:00000006

Note that bold word above as the reg key doesn't normally exist and you do have to ADD it to the registry.

What kills me is that they would do this while knowing that Win 2k3 servers are going to be out there for a really really long time. Ah well, one can waste a lot of time trying to figure out what goes on in the mind of Microsoft.

Me, I'd rather move on to the next problem. :D

We are now broadcasting from a new underground HQ

Well chalk one up to the corporate machine.

Had to move my blog to my personal account. Long story but not worth detailing here.

Anyway stay tuned from more IT insight and advice.