Nothing prints and the Print Spooler service keeps stopping by itself
A stuck print job or a corrupt driver file can take down the whole Spooler service. Often a mix of old and new drivers.
Try this first
- 1Open Services (services.msc), find "Print Spooler", stop the service.
- 2Go to C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS and delete everything in that folder. Only pending print jobs, no drivers or settings.
- 3Start Print Spooler again. Try a test page.
- 4Still broken, run a driver cleanup. In an admin CMD, run "printui /s /t2" to view the driver list. Remove suspect or duplicate drivers.
- 5For a durable fix, prefer Type 4 (V4) drivers as default. They are package-aware and resist corruption better than classic V3 drivers.
When to bring us in
If it returns across machines: usually a driver is misregistered on a fileserver Print Management share. We can clean it centrally, beats fixing 8 laptops one by one.
See also
- Printer suddenly not foundFor everyone at once: print server or network. For one person: local Windows driver or expired authorisation.
- Print job stuck in queue, nothing happensA stuck queue blocks all subsequent prints. Cleaning takes two minutes.
- Scanner no longer sends emails (scan-to-email)Almost always: the account the scanner uses had its password expire, or the mail provider blocks old protocols.
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