Printer Spool Services suddenly stopped working

Aldo

System: Windows Vista 32bit with all the updates installed.
I have no printer attached to this PC, all I want to do is be able to print to CutePDF*

I have printed to PDF for as long as I've had this PC, but as of today it's no longer working. I run in the error that Printer Spooler Services is no longer running. When I check it's supposed to start-up automatically, but it's currently stopped. When I start it, it does not give any errors, but when I go back to try and print something it's still giving the error that the service is not running. When I click back to Printer Spooler Services it shows that it has stopped again, without giving any error messages.

So far I have deleted all printers through the relevant regedit tool as suggested here and tried starting the spooler through cmd.exe. Again it says it's starting up just fine, but when I try to do anything it throws up an error telling me it's not working.

Basically, I have the feeling I caught my PC running in circles and I have no idea what I should do to get it back to a stage where I can just re-install CutePDF and let it run properly.


*which nests itself in the printer list

uean

Urgh. Did you do any Windows updates recently? That sounds like a driver issue, the driver not being compatible with your version of Windows. Since it's been working for a long time though it's hard to say that that would be the cause.

I'd try uninstalling CutePDF as a first thing. Do you have any other printers on the machine? If its only the PDF, uninstall CutePDF, reboot, install PDFCreator, and give that a whirl. I've seen this a few times before and it is either a driver issue or ????. Never fully solved it unfortunately

Aldo

uean wrote:

Urgh. Did you do any Windows updates recently? That sounds like a driver issue, the driver not being compatible with your version of Windows. Since it's been working for a long time though it's hard to say that that would be the cause.

I'd try uninstalling CutePDF as a first thing. Do you have any other printers on the machine? If its only the PDF, uninstall CutePDF, reboot, install PDFCreator, and give that a whirl. I've seen this a few times before and it is either a driver issue or ????. Never fully solved it unfortunately

Unfortunately I can't uninstall CutePDF or install a newer version because the first thing CutePDF is trying to access the printer list...which is only accessible if Spooler is running*.

Would there be a way to install an older driver for printers? I just did that for my videocard because that was giving me BSODs (I have a nagging suspicion the two are related, but I have no idea what would cause this shitstorm). I mean, this is probably too easy.

*There's probably a more technical way to say this.