Removing a priint driver from a GPO-deployed printer

Question

_{Thursday, May 19, 2011 6:00 PM}

We've got a single Windows 7 machine that we believe has a print driver issue with a GPO-deployed printer. We've assigned printers to the Computer using Group Policy so deleting the printer and then the local drive is quite a challenge. Is there a 'preferred' way to remove a GPO-deployed printer from one system so that we could remove the driver from that client?Orange County District Attorney

All replies (4)

_{Friday, May 20, 2011 4:48 PM ✅Answered}

Hey Sandy, I'll give you a hand.  I know you can figure this out but let's get you on a speedy path.

Remove the computer from the GPO, reboot.  For wide deployment I do not have control of the GPO permissions, I just get to add and remove computers and users from a security group that is tied to the GPO.  This normally takes a couple hours from the time I remove the computer from the security group until the computer no longer is associated with the GPO.

Once the policy no longer applies, the connection gets removed for the one user that is logged on.  The problem now , and not just for deployed printers, are the other USER keys that still have the connection associated, until all the users log on and have the connection removed.

You can short circuit this now that the connection has been remove from HKCU\Printers\Connections on the current session by stopping the print spooler service.  Then start the print spooler service.

As long as there are no UI components loaded by the explorer process you should be able to remove the Driver AND Package without having to log on the other users.  I kill explorer but sometimes (mainly with HP drivers), winlogon has a reference to a driver file which you would need to reboot for.

If this does not work for you you can always we can use the "Not preferred method".

net stop spooler

delete the print driver registry key  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\ x86 or x64\Drivers\Version-3\DRIVERNAME

net start spooler

Alan Morris Windows Printing Team

_{Friday, May 20, 2011 10:42 PM ✅Answered}

Thanks for the help on my issue Morris. We were able to remove the system from the OU assigning the printer and it let us remove the printer for our troubled user. Adding it back in seemed to re-load the driver correctly after we deleted it. Thanks again for the help.

Orange County District Attorney

_{Friday, May 20, 2011 8:49 AM}

Hi,

Thanks for the post.

First of all, I don't understand that why it will be a challenge to delete the printer that has been deployed with GPO and then the local driver on one client machine.

In addition, what's your printer connection type that was set in GPO? For per-computer connections, Windows adds the printer connections when the user logs on. For per-user connections, Windows adds the printer connections during background policy refresh. If you remove the printer connection settings from the GPO, Windows removes the corresponding printers from the client computer during the next background policy refresh or user logon.

Have you set the Point and Print Restrictions setting in Computer Configuration of the domain GPO? If not, maybe we could set a local policy on this Win7 client to enable Point and Print Restrictions. In this way, the printer driver will not be automatically installed on the client after you manually remove the problematic printer.

Thanks,

Miles

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_{Friday, May 20, 2011 2:36 PM}

Hello,

Here's the challenge. With a per-computer connection, we havent' found an easy way delete the printer. Not from Devices and Printers because it's a per-computer connection. We could spelunk the registry but what keys and hives to delete? Until we delete the printer, we can't delete the driver because it's in use.

We don't want to remove the printer connection from the GPO as many other users are connected. I mean, if we have to, we will but it seems a bit heavy handed.

When setting up our printing strategy, I thought using per-computer connections were the way to go but now that I'm seeing some isolated problems, I'm wishing I had gone down the per-user connection path. It would be much easier to deal with this issue.

Orange County District Attorney