Saturday, September 15, 2007

Print job stuck and cannot delete

I sent few print jobs to our HP 1200 printer connected to home network via print server and noticed printer is showing Out of paper error. I think problem is somewhere in network connection which I decided to look into later but when I tried to cancel all jobs that were in the pritner queue all except one got deleted.

The stuck job can be deleted by stopping and restarting the spool service. To do this

  1. Open Command Prompt
  2. Run following command
    net stop spooler
  3. Restart the service by running command
    net start spooler
Alternately try below

  1. In Control Panel->Services, browse to the Spooler service and stop it. If you are using TCP/IP Printing Services, stop it also.
  2. Delete the .spl and .shd files from %SystemRoot%\System32\Spool\Printers that have the approximate time and date of the print job causing the problem.
  3. Restart the sevices that you stopped.

NOTE: if *.spl file(s) can not be deleted or renamed. Renaming the *.shd file and restarting the spooler service may be enough to clear the problem.