One of the troubleshooting steps in resolving printer-related issues with any version of Windows is to remove installed print drivers and then reinstall the drivers. This is a domain environment and drivers are pulled from a print server.
I've had occasion to need to do this on a user's system running Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit. These procedures don't work:
Removing the printer from Devices and Printers (doesn't remove driver obviously).
Doing the above, going into Server Properties, and attempting to remove the driver (fails with a "driver in use" error).
Opening an empty
mmc
, adding thePrint Management
snap-in, and attempting to do the above (also fails with a "driver in use" error).Doing
sc stop spooler
andsc start spooler
before doing both of the above.The printer is not visible in Device Manager. It's a shared network printer so maybe that has something to do with it not being there.
Now I know it's possible to remove drivers with the spooler service stopped and then going into the spool directory, as well as deleting registry entries. That's dangerous and I might not get everything Windows considers part of the driver.
I'm asking if a tool exists to do this where I can just select the driver in question and it be removed.
NOTE: I am remoted into the system in question via RDP.
mmc
console but I still have to stop and start the spooler to get rid of ones that exist on the users system.