Deleted printers keeps coming back – and multiply

group-policyprinterremote desktopwindows-server-2012windows-server-2012-r2

My users are on 2012 R2 RDS Session Host servers.

I've used "Deploy Printers" (from Print Manager) to deploy 4 printers. The last week, I've had a lot of problems where users can't print. If I deleted the printer and added it again, they could print just fine.

Now I've removed all printer deploying from GPO – and I have no printers in any login scripts. I did a gpupdate /force, but all the 4 printers are now listed 3 times…

enter image description here

If I delete the printers and log off and back on, all the printers are popping up again. Sigh! This is driving me nuts.

This script doesn't show any of the "SVFREJA" printers…

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colPrinters = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Select * From Win32_Printer")

If colPrinters.Count <> 0 Then 'If there are some network printers
    Dim s
    s = ""
        For Each objPrinterInstalled In colPrinters ' For each network printer
        s = s + objPrinterInstalled.Name + chr(13)
        Next
    msgbox s
End if

It gives me this result…

enter image description here

(sry for the big picture)

My problem is not with the "redirected" printers, my problem is that I have several printers with the same name (on SVFREJA) and I can't get rid of them.

Any idea why I can't get rid of the "ophaned" printers??

Best Answer

I had this exact same problem. After I deleted a Group Policy printers kept coming back all over the place.

The only solution for me was:

  • Downloading PSTools
  • Running CMD as administrator
  • Run the command psexec -i -s c:\windows\regedit.exe (make sure you don't have regedit open already, otherwise it gives an error)
  • Delete all keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\SWD\PRINTENUM which contained the printer name that keeps coming back.

You have to use the PStools option, because otherwise you will get an access denied error when deleting the regkeys.

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