I'm having a tough time removing old printer connections that were deployed using Group Policy Preferences. We push these printers under User Configuration > Preferences > Control Panel Settings > Printers, and each one has its own GPO targeted to specific groups. Now, with a new print server in place, I need to get rid of the old connections. While I've set the objects to 'Delete' or tried 'Delete all shared printer connections', it works some of the time but fails on others, throwing a 'Catastrophic Failure' error in the event log without any further details.
On the machines where it fails, I've tried several methods—like using Remove-Printer and the printui DLL command—but I keep running into 'access denied' errors. Also attempted manual deletions through the control panel, which prompts for UAC but isn't successful.
I've gone into the registry to delete entries under HKCU and HKLM related to printers, but it's not solving the issue and sometimes leads to duplicate entries.
I'm looking for a foolproof way to remove these printers using a PowerShell script while running as SYSTEM. I'm fed up with the necessity of remote access and entering LAPS passwords just to delete these printers one by one. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
4 Answers
Another thing you could try is stopping the printer spooler service and then attempting to remove the printers using an elevated PowerShell session.
From my experience, printer issues like this often arise from driver conflicts or orphaned records. If your old print server is still reachable, try re-adding the printers and then removing them. If not, you might need to replicate the old printer's setup on the new server and create a DNS alias for it. Another method is to install the old printer driver locally on the troublesome machine before trying to remove the listing again. It might help to see screenshots of how the printer appears in the control panel for more context.
If manual connection to the print server lets you delete without issues, it points to the GPO push being the culprit. Those GPP delete commands really seem hit or miss.
You can't remove a user's mapped printers when running as SYSTEM. That's why things get tricky. The end users have to use elevated permissions to delete their local devices, complicating remote management. It may be worthwhile to focus on getting user permissions sorted out.
Yeah, that’s the thing! When users manually connect, they can delete just fine. But the GPO complication makes it impossible.
Have you tried running 'gpupdate /force'? Sometimes it can help refresh the GPO settings and may fix underlying issues with printer connections.
Tried that already, but it just seems to retry the delete commands that ultimately fail again.
Unfortunately, we're using Ricoh Universal Print drivers, so I can't just uninstall drivers. Sometimes re-adding helps, but not always. I tried re-adding with the 'Update' setting, but it still throws that 'catastrophic failure' when trying to delete.