Spooler subsystem app encountered a problem and needs to close

bijayprusti

Honorable
Aug 28, 2013
78
0
10,660
Worse - it won't start back-up!

I have twice had this problem where the print spooler ceases working entirely using both Windows XP and Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit OSs. This is not a virus, it's a bug.

My experience is that the Microsoft Automated Trouble Shooting Service tool will not fix the problem, nor will rebooting the machine, and any number of other fixes I have seen recommended on-line.

In Vista 32 the failure of the spooler can also prevent all of the printers icon images from being displayed in the control panel, making it very difficult or impossible to uninstall and re-intall printers.

The solution is two steps, both fortunately fairly simple:

Step 1:

Look in C:\Windows\System32\Spool\PRINTERS\ folder. If you have a 64 bit OS it will be a System64 folder. You will find one or more files with an .SHD extension. Delete all of these files. When you print the next time, the spooler will re-create these files without the offending content in them. Then reboot your machine. This should solve the problem for the operating system and print spooler, but you still need to fix the file you are trying to print, or the problem will re-occur.

Step 2:

The problem appears to come from MS-Office (both 2003 and 2007 versions) when users imbed graphic files in office documents and the edge of the graphic falls outside the edge of the document page as displayed on the screen in the program. It is not always obvious that this is the case, as the background for the graphic image may be transparent. The print spooler problem can occur when printing directly from programs like MS-Word or MS-Powerpoint or when the MS-Office export filter is used to save the document in other formats such as PDF and HTML, that are then printed under these operating systems. Many non-Microsoft conversion filters fortunately do not appear to inherit this problem in their output.

Check the files you are printing to be sure that the edges of graphics on the page do not fall outside the displayed page in MS Office. If you find instances of this, move or re-size the graphic to prevent this, and save the file with this fix in place or re-export to your preferred file format.

Things should work fine after you make these changes.
 

Eddy Escoffier

Reputable
Oct 30, 2014
1
0
4,510
sorry to spoil your spooler party guys but all of the methods mentioned above "DO NOT WORK" It would be nice if someone who really knows his or hers stuff can post a true solution to this problem. Please post something that works, not something you think may work. Thanks