I have a Group Policy Object designed for users in a particular department which should delete all existing printer mappings, and then map all users to 9 different printers (all on the same server). The issue is that the "Delete All" item does not seem to take effect, and then two of the nine printers are skipped and do not end up installed on client PCs. I am more concerned about the skipped printers than the "Delete all", though it is interesting that they are both being skipped.
Notable is that the two skipped printers are the only two Canon printers (IR-ADV 8295) of the nine and share a driver. I updated the driver during troubleshooting with no effect.
I'm currently troubleshooting this on my own account. I added myself to the Targeted group and created a link to my OU.
All client PCs are Windows 7 x64, and all printers have associated x64 drivers installed on the server (no 32-bit drivers are installed on the server).
Here are other things I've tried:
Checked Event Viewer on a client PC, and found nothing relevant in "Applications and Services -> Microsoft -> Windows -> GroupPolicy -> Operational" or in any of the Windows Logs.
Checked printer configuration on the server (e.g. permissions) and all nine printers have uniform configuration.
Checked for spelling errors and configuration issues with the GPO items, and all nine items have uniform configuration with no errors.
Discovered that the skipped printers can be manually mapped/installed successfully.
Enabled Point-and-Print policy in the GPO and set to "do not show warning" for both drop downs, which made no difference.
Installed the printer driver prior to running the GPO, which did not make a difference.
I'm running out of things to troubleshoot, so let me know if you have a suggestion!
Best Answer
All of your comments were great possibilities and certainly things to check in a case like this, but it turns out my issue was that the preferences were item-level targeted to members of a specific group. Double-clicking on the Targeting item displays a SID that must match the targeted group, and the issue was that although all printers were targeted to the exact same group, the SID was missing from the two printers which weren't mapping.
Apparently, by design, you MUST search for the group and select it in order for the SID field to populate and the policy to apply correctly.
I was led to this discovery by going to the "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Group Policy\History" directory and finding the "Printers.xml" file. It will show which policies applied, and details about their targeting. In my case, there was an entry for the non-working printer mappings which said
SID="".