Me and my co-worker have setup a new print server on a Windows Server 2019 and are manually sharing the printers via the simplest way. Printer Properties -> Share. Since this is working very well, we wanted to remove the old shared printers as it would be part of the cleaning up. Strangely enough those that have been removed keep reappearing. 4 of them appear as unidentified devices with " on " and one appears as a normal printer. We made sure to unshare the printer from the old print server, yet the server is still up and running and connected to the network. Nether the less, the whole thing is most bizarre to us.
Here some more details. The printers reappear on a terminal server running Win Server 2012 R2. To this server there are up to 10 users connecting to to run our tool and to do their job. Only those users are having this issue, even tho they don't notice, we from IT know about it and want to solve this.
So far we have verified this. The GPO comes from out main activ directory. That AD is running on 2019 Datacenter and was installed a month or more ago. We basically copied over the settings from the old AD. When we verified the user's AD Groups there is only the Domain User group given, as they don't need anything else. The GPO got no entry pointing towards any network printers that should be deployed. The Printer Management on the AD is empty except for the Windows XPS and some other unrelated printers. There are no login scripts given to those users which could have added the printer. If I log in with my account, those printers are not added. There are no scripts running in the Task Scheduler for the users which would run every few seconds to readd the printers. There are no items left in the print spooler folder that could cause more than one printer to reappear. There is only one file in it from 2015, with both the creation and modification date being from 2015.
Another strange thing is, that the printer reappears after let's say 10-20 seconds and a refresh of Printer and Devices. Also it gives me 3 printers for each printer added. By this I mean I can select one of three if I want to open Printer Properties or whatever.
Are there any other places we can look or did anyone experience something similar? The others point to the GPP and I assume that is the GPO but as I said we did not see an entry related to printing. But I also must admit, we are no PROs when it comes to the GPO and only know some basics.
