Print Monitors gone after changing them in Autorun

I confirm this as well. I messed up several workstations with this bug. When this happens, all printers are greyed out because their port is missing. You cannot add any new printers because a port cannot be created. I am working on recovering printers on the affected workstations. Mark Russinovich, I hope you see this and fix the problem.

Ping, @Mark Russinovich
(I hope this is the Mark we're looking for... Not so experienced in the forum manner here, but is this how you bring it someone's attention?)

Hi Micce,

I am not sure about the ping to Mark. However it seems the correct to me.

I want to add some information about what happened to me. I was trying to remove some stubborn print drivers on several Windows 10 workstations. In my case I did not do an uncheck but a delete instead. This caused the entire registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors to be emptied. Thus resulting in all printers being greyed out. This is because there is no port association with the printers. It also caused adding a new port under print management to fail. This of course means that no new printers can be added.

The only was I have been able to recover from this is to run a repair install keeping files and programs. I have done this on a couple of critical machines.

I am hoping Mark will help with this because that is not an efficient way to correct this problem. I will try to ping him again...

@Mark Russinovich

You can delete the key

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled  

by opening the registry via system account. Use psexec.exe -s -i regedit.exe and try deleting the entry