[THIN] Re: Users can't assign default printers

Here's a great tip for newbies to the list - just save / archive all of
Rick's posts.

The guy deserves an award for his contributions, here.

Neil

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steve Greenberg
> Sent: 30 May 2007 23:06
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Re: Users can't assign default printers
> 
>  
> 
> Rick,
> 
> Would you like to move to Arizona and work with us? If you 
> leave now you can get here just in time for our summer 
> projects and 115 degree temperatures!!
> 
> Steve Greenberg
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rick Mack
> Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 1:56 PM
> To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [THIN] Users can't assign default printers
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Had a bit of fun yesterday with an interesting printing problem.  
> 
> The customer had set the site up themselves (not one of 
> mine!) and things had been going fairly well, except for one 
> major annoyance. Printer assignments were scripted and were 
> obviously working, but Excel complained that there was no 
> printer present, despite Word etc being able to print fine 
> though you always had to select the printer. 
> 
> All printers were standard network print shares on a single 
> file/print server. The Citrix servers were PS4, Windows 
> Server 2003 SP1.
> 
> When I started looking it was obvious that the servers had 
> been cloned from a production image because the ctx_sma user 
> permissions for DCOM and the ICA listener were screwed up. 
> Since that's going to have a negative effect on printing, the 
> first thing I did was fix all the permissions and DCOM login 
> information. 
> 
> A reboot and the problem was still there. 
> 
> When I tried to add a network printer via the printer and 
> faxes applet, I got the error "You do not have sufficient 
> access to your computer to connect to the selected printer". 
> That's normally the error you get when the right drivers 
> aren't installed so I checked, and sure enough, the drivers 
> installed were all over the place. 
> 
> A really quick way to suck all the drivers off a print server 
> is a single line command which uses con2prt from the NT resource kit:
> 
> for /f %i in ('net view \\printserver <file:///\\printserver> 
>  ^| find /i "print"') do con2prt /c \\printserver\%i 
> <file:///\\printserver\%25i> 
> 
> Okay, all drivers were now loaded but I still got the error. 
> 
> If I persisted in trying to create the printer connection, it 
> actually worked but came up with a new error, "Cannot set 
> default printer". That was a new one and I finally resorted 
> to Google. I found a forum link that pointed me to a KB 
> article suggesting a corrupted registry key (no comment on 
> which one!) among other things. And of course a link to a 
> Brian Madden forum saying "that fixed it for me". But the 
> link was dead 'cause Brian's rebuilt the whole site :-( 
> 
> So what could I do now that Google had let me down?
> 
> Find out what's happening of course. I used process monitor 
> and looked at explorer.exe, spoolsv.exe, rundll32.exe etc but 
> it didn't show me anything useful. No access denied etc. 
> Everything I tried failed to point me in the right direction 
> and I kept thinking about the useless KB article that said it 
> might be a registry corruption. 
> 
> So I started what was happening at the registry level when a 
> user tried to create a printer and assign it as a default.
> 
> All the connections stuff was happening okay under 
> HKCU\Printers so that was fine which made sense 'cause you 
> could print (except from Excel). 
> 
> The next step is that the default printer is defined under 
> HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows, in 
> a value, Device.
> 
> But when I looked for the default printer value for a 
> non-admin user, it wasn't there. Matter of fact the whole 
> Windows key wasn't there.
> 
> When I manually created the Windows key under 
> HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion for a user, 
> the errors went away and you could set your default printer. 
> Excel was happy, the customer was happy and so was I ;-) 
> 
> The fix was 3 lines of script on login the checked whether 
> the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows 
> key existed, and if not create it.
> 
> A bit more research suggested that the problem could be an 
> occasional result of installing SP1.
> 
> So if you're "lucky" enough to see this problem, now you know 
> how to fix it.
> 
> regards,
> 
> Rick
> 
> --
> Ulrich Mack
> Commander Australia 
> 
> 



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