Windows – How to delete system default printer forms

printingwindows

On Windows there are system default printer forms which can't be deleted from the Print Server Properties dialog. Is there some other way they can be removed? We are never going to use page sizes like Envelope, B5(JIS), US Std Fanfold, etc. and I'd like to save users (and myself!) from having to scroll through a big long list of noise.

Print server properties box has a unusable delete button

Our print servers are Windows Server 2003 if that makes any difference.

Best Answer

My first thought was to see if this could be accomplished by using the Windows API's, but according to this website about the Win32 Printer Forms API, it's not even possible to delete system forms programmatically:

One cannot DeleteForm() on a builtin form: it fails with ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER.

My second thought was to find a relatively unique form name, such as US Std Fanfold and search the whole registry. Surprisingly, the entry crops in quite a number of places. My suggestion, therefore, would be to build a blank 32 bit machine (32 bit to avoid confusion with shadow keys) and go to town on some of those keys. If you get it working it should be easy to transpose to wherever you need to do this.

However, it has to be said, that given how much Microsoft clearly don't want you to do this, you are opening yourself up to support and compatibility issues.

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