I really appreciate your answer and explanation. This seemed to occur after the last set of MS patches were installed and I was hesitant to install them on the rest of the farm. ________________________________ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rick Mack Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 4:41 PM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: [THIN] Re: Printers randomly disappear in Citrix Hi, Excel gets a bit more close and personal to the printer drivers than other office products. From win2k onwards, all O.S. native (supplied with O.S.) non-postscript printer drivers are unidriver-based. That is, the driver characteristics are defined in a text script file with a .GPD file extension. For more complex printers, or printers belonging to a common set of models, the GPD file may also reference other GPS include files. This can cause some interesting problems which I'll elaborate on later. Before an application can print to a printer using a newly installed printer driver (unidriver based) the GPD file has to be compiled into a BUD file (binary printer description). If the user attempting to print doesn't have write access to %systemroot%\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 then they won't be able to compile a BUD file and prinit will fail. In the case of Excel, the printer won't even show up. Once an administrator tries to print to the "failing" printer, the BUD file has been created and everyone is happy. But life isn't quite that simple. If any new printer driver comes along that update any of the include .GPD files, every driver that uses the same .GPD include file will need to be recompiled into a new BUD file. So if you install a new HP printer model that includes an updated .GPD include file, every other HP printer using that GPD file will fail. Until an admin connects to a printer using that driver. If you want to retain directory security to %systemroot%\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 then a possible "quick" fix is for an admin to connect to all available network printers (and hopefully use all the printer drivers that need to be recompiled) with something like: for /f %i in ('net view \\print_server <file:///\\print_server> ^| find /i "print"') do con2prt /c \\print_server <file:///\\print_server> But the other solution is just to open up the directory permissions. It's easy enough to do via group policy if you've got a bunch of servers. regards, Rick Ulrich Mack Volante Systems ________________________________ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx on behalf of Werther, Chris Sent: Sat 20/11/2004 1:05 AM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Re: Printers randomly disappear in Citrix Same issue here. We discovered the other day that if a domain admin prints to the printer, it all of a sudden becomes available to the user in Excel. ________________________________ From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Fontein, N. (Niels) Sent: Friday, November 19, 2004 8:38 AM To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [THIN] Re: Printers randomly disappear in Citrix We have the same problem here now and then. Most of the time it seems to be network related, but we can't get a finger on it. Groeten, Niels Fontein Coördinator Hardware T 0485 499 375 / 226 F 0485 499 364 E N.Fontein@xxxxxxxxx ________________________________ Van: Brian Hall [mailto:bhall@xxxxxxxx] Verzonden: donderdag 18 november 2004 4:59 Aan: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Onderwerp: [THIN] Printers randomly disappear in Citrix When a user goes to print in Excel, sometimes printers are available, sometimes they're not. When the printers disappear, users can still hit the 'Print' icon and it sends the job to their default printer. The problem doesn't affect other applications (Word, Access, etc) on the Citrix server and can happen to any user randomly throughout the day. We recently doubled our user base from 45 to 90. Single server running W2KTS, Citrix MF FR2, Dell 2500 dual P4 2.4, 3 GB ram, dual swap files, paged pool memory fix. Any idea what's causing this? Thanks, Brian Hall Network Administrator American Financial Realty Trust 680 Old York Road, Jenkintown PA 19046 Tel: 215-887-2280 ext.2840 Fax: 215-887-9856 Email: bhall@xxxxxxxx Disclaimer - 11/17/2004 This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the named addressees. If you are not a named addressee you should not review, disseminate, distribute, copy or alter this email. If you have received this email in error, please notify us immediately by reply email and delete the original message. 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