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We have a Citrix XenApp 6.5 farm on Windows 2008 R2 that serves an application to our end users. Recently we have found that if the spooler service hangs, the application no longer launches for new users that login because the application queries the spooler service on startup. Users print using this application on a daily basis.

I believe there is an issue with printer drivers that is causing the spooler service to hang, but we are unable to reproduce the issue reliably.

If I do have a bad printer driver, how can I isolated and identify it? If it is not a printer driver how can I identify what is causing the spooler to hang?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Dino Padilla
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3 Answers3

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Try working through CTX136332: Printing Recommendations for a XenApp/Terminal Server Environment (Archived here.)

Especially these steps:

Complete the following steps to fix the issue:

  1. Contact the manufacturer of the printer driver to verify if they are aware of the issue and obtain an updated or recommended driver.

Use Citrix Print Detective to list all drivers and then start your examination with the drivers listed in the Non-Native/Non-Citrix Drivers Only view.

  1. Use the Citrix Universal Driver.

  2. Isolate the printer driver if Windows Server 2008 R2 is used.

[...]

You may also try the Stress Printers tool mentioned in that article.

Community
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StackzOfZtuff
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Typically you will be able to find an AppCrash event in the event viewer like below:

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Application Error
Event ID:      1000
...
Faulting application name: spoolsv.exe, version: 6.1.7601.17777, time stamp: 0x4f35fc1d
Faulting module name: RPCRT4.dll, version: 6.1.7601.18205, time stamp: 0x51dba4dc
...

You can then try to ascertain which print driver the faulting module (RPCRT4.dll)is related to, I don't know any easy ways to do this, but you can view the DLLs associated with a print driver from Print Management > Drivers > Properties as shown below. (The DLL name will often give a clue as to the manufacturer as well, eg HPxxxx.DLL would be HP, CNxxxx.DLL may be a Canon driver, etc). Print Driver Properties

BlueCompute
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Another possibility to create a crash or hang dumb with the

Debug Diagnostic Tool https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49924

Select what you what to monitor, in this case the spooler service and let it create a full hand or crash dumb.

You should be able to find the driver/dll that causes the issues and then, as mentioned before, isolate tis driver or better try to find a replacement that you can you.

ThinPrint
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  • We were able to find that an old 32 bit app on the server was trying to access 64 bit printer drivers through the dumps and that was the root cause of the issue. Thanks. – Dino Padilla Feb 11 '16 at 16:31