.net – Error “Settings to access printer ‘printername’ are not valid” when printing from Windows service

You have at least three options. I have presented them in order of usage preference.

Method 1 - You can use the SC tool (Sc.exe) included in the Resource Kit. (included with Windows 7/8)

Open a Command Prompt and enter

sc delete <service-name>

Tool help snippet follows:

DESCRIPTION:
        SC is a command line program used for communicating with the
        NT Service Controller and services.

delete----------Deletes a service (from the registry).

Method 2 - use delserv

Download and use delserv command line utility. This is a legacy tool developed for Windows 2000. In current Window XP boxes this was superseded by sc described in method 1.

Method 3 - manually delete registry entries (Note that this backfires in Windows 7/8)

Windows services are registered under the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

Search for the sub-key with the service name under referred key and delete it. (and you might need to restart to remove completely the service from the Services list)

There are issues with credentials that you could solve by impersonation or elevating rights of the user the web app is running under.

However, we did it by adding the network printer as a printer on the server (add printer dialogue on server) and having the job sent to that printer.

We used the Printing.PrintDocument like so (Code in VB)....

Public Class SpecialReportPrintJob
  Inherits Printing.PrintDocument

Protected Overrides Sub OnBeginPrint(ByVal ev as Printing.PrintEventArgs)
  MyBase.OnBeginPrint(ev)

  Me.PrinterSettings.PrinterName = "PrinterNameUsedOnServer"

  'setup rest of stuff....
End Sub  
End Class
'And we then call it like so
Dim printSpecialReport as new SpecialReportPrintJob()
printSpecialReport.Print()