Hi everyone! I'm reaching out because I've run into a persistent issue with our network printers. We have around 75 of them, and sometimes print jobs get stuck in the queue. I try to cancel them, but they remain stuck as 'Deleting - Printed', and this ends up holding up all other jobs. I've looked everywhere but haven't found a concrete fix. I can't remotely restart the spooler services, and the print management tools don't seem to help. Additionally, when I log into the printer directly, I see no pending jobs, and there aren't any temp files in the PRINTERS folder on the user's device. We don't use a virtual environment, and all our laptops are running Windows 11. I'd appreciate any advice you can give me!
4 Answers
The inability to restart the spooler is unfortunate because that’s often a key solution. Typically, the problem cycle goes: User prints and gets an error, attempts to delete the job, admin tries but can't, then attempts to restart the spooler, and if that fails, manually clearing the SPOOL folder usually resolves it.
If the spooler isn’t starting, try powering off the network printer. Sometimes a simple restart can clear everything. If that doesn’t do the trick, let the user with the stuck job restart their machine too—sometimes that helps.
You might need to update your print drivers. When this happens, I usually stop the Print Spooler service and then manually clear out the C:WindowsSystem32spoolPRINTERS directory. That usually does the trick for me.
It sounds like this could be an issue with the printer settings. If it’s a shared printer, make sure that the 'Render print jobs on client computers' option is checked. Also, check if the stuck print job came from a device that’s not currently connected to the network. If that's the case, the job might be trying to reach that computer to cancel it, which would explain why it's stuck.
Thanks for the tip! I’ll look into the render jobs option. The user is on the network, but I'll double-check everything.
I already restarted the printer and had the user restart as well, but the job is still stuck.