We have several remote/mobile users who travel between numerous locations and install local printers specific to those locations. These users might exceed 50 printers on their system. With Windows 7, it was never an issue. The OS left them alone and so when they returned to that location, they were able to simply resume printing. Additionally, they would send jobs to one of these offline printers so that when they arrived at the site, they would print automatically upon connection. This enabled them to set these printers up to print which saved them a lot of time, allowing them to focus on other responsibilities.
What seems to be happening with Windows 10, is that after a month or so, it is automatically cleaning these stale printers up, assuming that they are no longer needed. I have found that even when it does this, in a few cases I have had to run the devnodeclean tool from Microsoft to clean up shadow copies of printers it tried to remove because it tends to cause the Devices & Printers menu to take up to 10 minutes to load. The shadow copies show up in Device Manager but do not actually appear in the Devices & Printers screen in that case.
Is there a way to disable this "feature" and prevent the cleanup of these printers? They are offline but there is nothing wrong with them; they just aren't connected for a few weeks. I have tried finding information on this without any luck. I also looked through local group policy but I can't find any particular setting that might control cleaning up stale local printers.
