Printer driver errors and conflicts

There are some specific problems that can happen if you have a defective print driver or a conflict from having multiple copies of one printer.  Having multiple copies doesn't always result in problems but it's not a good practice and on occasion it will create issues. 

For instance your trying to print and you just keep getting an error within the print queue or worse you receive the "Print spooler service fails" no matter how many times you stop and start it within Services. You've varified that communication to the printer is successful and even reinstalling the driver doesn't fix it. What you need to do is COMPLETELY remove the current printer and all of it's driver files and reinstall it and also delete any duplicate files.  There are couple of different ways to do this depending on what version of Windows your running.

If your working in Vista or Windows 7 you can open the Print Management console.>>

Open the control panel by pressing the windows key+R at the same time and typing "control", then press enter.

When the Control Panel window comes up change your View to icon view instead of Category. Find Administrative Tools within the panel.

Under Administrative tools, go to Print Management.  Next you'll see a list of the installed printers on the left side under Custom Filters\All Printers. 

  Choose the problematic printer, right click, and under the drop menu choose DELETE.

On the left side find "All Drivers". The printer you just deleted will still be listed here because you haven't deleted any of the driver files.  Right-click the corresponding driver, and choose "Remove Driver Package". 

*Note: If you get an error stating that the printer is still in use while trying to remove the driver packages, just restart your computer and try again.

Now you can reinstall the drivers and your problem should be resolved. 

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The process for XP users is a little different but achieves the same thing.  

Bring up another RUN box like we did above and type "control printers".

Then when the Printers window pops up right click on the copy or copies of the problematic printer and delete it.

Once you've have deleted the printer and it dissapears go to the top of the window where the menu bar is and select "File>Server Properties".  Then you should see a window with some tabs at the top.  You want to go to the tab labeled Drivers.

Select the Printer and click on Remove at the bottom and click "Apply>OK".  *Note:  Like before, if you receive an error message that the printer is in use, restart and try again.

For some more in-depth reading on cleaning up print drivers you can have a look at the page below.  It's and old article but gives some good insight on manually removing print drivers in case what I've listed here does not fix your driver errors.

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/CleanPrinterDrivers.htm