Printer spool non-existent?
 

I've been playing around with mini/micro computers since before the PC. One of the things that seemed to be always there is the ability to print things, even just dumps. We never gave much thought to the fact that, though the driver might be bad, at least something would get printed.

So...

My main desktop started acting up. It's a dual boot XP/Win7 configuration and I think I know what's wrong, but in the meantime I plopped down a spare SFF Dell I had that runs XP that I know is fully firewalled/antivirus/malware. I wasn't going to use it for long, and just for the normal dipstick stuff I do.

The printer I had on the other machine is a small laser printer that has worked flawlessly for a long time. I hooked it up, but was unable to communicate with it (parallel port - it's that old :)). Replaced the PP cable with a USB->Parallel cable. Same result.

When I try to add a printer, I get the message "Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running". What?

Well, it was down the rabbit hole from there. Google reveals that there are a lot of people who have this problem (and not just with XP) and the proposed solutions often don't work.

It would seem that this could be a serious problem, but I've never heard of it before.

I don't want to detail all the blind alleys I've gone down (including some freeware tools and advice from Microsoft), but this seems bizarre - I mean - computer -> printer, been doing this since the '50's. How can something this basic and simple fall so flat?

Add: I can print (text) to the printer using "print" command from the command line. So, the printer hardware is all there and working. It would seem that the spooler is AFU.

Notes:

1. I checked for the status of the file spoolsv.exe in Windows\system32. It didn't exist! So I copied it from another XP machine. No luck. The freeware tool claimed it was fixing everything, but it didn't.

2. It seems that, when you write to the printer, the spooler intercepts the data stream and manages putting it out to the printer - Windows does not talk directly to the printer. So, if the spooler is toast, you'll never get to the printer.

I have had very bad luck with USB -> Parallel adapters.

Besides spoolsv.exe, there should also be a spoolss.dll file in system32, and a spool directory with a number of subdirectories and files. You should also have a "Print Spooler" service in XP's list of Services (run services.msc at the command prompt, or just type "net start" to see if "Print Spooler" is an available service).

Checked all that first.

spoolsv.exe and spoolss.dll are where they're supposed to be. The spool directory is empty (since the spooler was never started). The Print Spooler Service does not exist.

I tried executing spoolsv.exe directly, but nothing happened.

In the Advanced tab of System Properties (Advanced->Performance->Data Execution Prevention) I added spoolsv.exe after turning on all programs. It still will not start.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Have you attempted the steps listed here?

Clearly I didn't. :)

Found lots of other similar tricks (which is why I see there are a lot of people with this problem) but not this one.

It's gonna take a while to try this, since I've never messed around with the registry before (haven't needed to), and I want to be careful since (as I understand it), poking around in the registry willy-nilly can do lots of bad things to your computer.

Thanks! I'll let you know how it turns out.

Following the instructions in the link ...

I got all the way to the point where I add the entries to the registry, and it tells me -

"The specified file is not a registry script. You can only import binary files from within the registry editor."

I don't know what a registry script looks like, and I certainly don't have a binary file here.

Am I missing something?

Never mind - I had left off the header line, which apparently tells it what to do.

Now to re-boot and see if it works.

That did it!

After reboot, the Print Spooler Service was started.

When I opened up the printer box, there were already 3 printers in there, two of them from the last time I used this computer, so apparently the registry got corrupted sometime between now and then. I have no idea who, what, or when that happened, but some pretty deep scans before I started this whole process showed nothing.

Oh well, another arrow in my quiver, eh?

Thanks again!

Congrats ^ :D

A lot of the solutions I saw involved loading 3rd party software, and I didn't think that was really prudent. This solution was posted on Microsoft's support site, and although it was submitted by a user rather than an MS representative, it didn't involve anything other than the usual Windows troubleshooting stuff (with the exception of the registry backup tool, which I probably wouldn't have used in your case given the registry values being changed).