Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.0 on Windows 7 print to network share gives error

Question

I've recently upgraded a client's workstations to brand new computers, with Windows 7 Professional. The server is still Windows Server 2003. The server has 2-3 file shares that get mapped to users' workstations as drives.

The client has also upgraded from Acrobat 6.0 to 9.0 Pro. Since the upgrade, when the client tries to print to the Adobe PDF printer (aka convert something to PDF via the printer interface), it gives an error in the queue if the file is being saved on the network drive. If I instead provide a local path, the file "prints" fine.

Additionally, if I change the Adobe PDF printer's settings to "don't spool, print directly to printer", it prints to the network share fine, but then it resets that setting every time.

Things I've checked for:

1. Permissions on the network share. The user and the computer has full access. We even gave the "Everyone" ibject full access.
2. Reinstall Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.0
3. Run updates to upgrade to 9.3.4

Has anyone else bumped into such a problem? The support fellows from Adobe are just taking me around in circles. They don't seem to have a clue either.

Answer 1

We had a similar issue where a user could not print to a network share, but could print without issue to his local drive. To fix it we did as follows:

1. Under DEVICES AND PRINTERS, we right-clicked on the "Adobe PDF" printer.

2. We picked "Printer Properties" from the context menu.

3. On the ADVANCED tab, we unchecked "Enable advanced printing features."

That seemed to do the trick, and the user can now print to network shares without issue. So you know, we did not have to change our spool settings. We still have it set to spool print documents and to start printing immediately.

Best of luck.

Answer 2

The other thing is, if I change the Adobe PDF printer's settings to "don't spool, print directly to printer", it prints to the network share fine, but then it resets that setting everytime.

Well I'm guessing that when you print directly to the printer, the print driver is loaded up in the process that is printing (and with the same security token as the user that invoked the process), and if you're using the print spooler then it's being loaded up as SYSTEM. SYSTEM and LOCAL SERVICE will not authenticate with the computer credentials, so when the spooler tries to write to the network share it can't authenticate and fails.

Run PROCMON and watch for denied writes to your network share while printing. See which process is writing it, and under which user.

Answer 3

I have the exact same problem and have not found a solution, but someone suggested a simple work-around: In Word, use the "Save as...." command and save the document as a PDF file (one of the options on the Word scroll-down menu) and direct it to the appropriate folder on the network.

Not the most elegant solution, but it works.