Print Spooler Errors/Problems-You Wont BELIEVE The Cause

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California4x4

Suddenly my printers stopped working, all of them, and the scanner, my
system started to bog down and I got SPOOLSV.EXE errors. I did CheckDisks, I
did Mem Checks, I scanned for Viruses and Trojans, cleaned up the Registry,
did a CHKDSK /R from the XP install CD... nothing! Then I did some more
research and came up with the cause and the solution which you WILL want to
know about.

I saw a blog entry about wiping out the contents of windows\system32\spooler
but thought that a bit drastic. However. I went into that folder and
started looking around.

In windows\system32\spool\printer I found two files that did NOT belong
there. How they got there is anyone's guess. They we 0002.SPL and
0002.SHD, both of which are Shockwave Flash objects.

When I deleted these (and it took some doing) EVERYTHING returned to normal.

Apparently the Spooler does NOT know what to do with these file types in the
...\printer folder (understandable) so it kept chewing and chewing and chewing
and chewing on them to the point where I couldn't bring up my list of
printers, couldn't reinstall printer drivers, kept getting DeviceIO
Notification popups, constantly got SPOOLSV.EXE "could not read" memory error
instructions, and so forth during shutdown attempts.

So, the moral is, when you are having weird Spooler errors, check out your
windows\system32\spool\printer folder and look for "weird" stuff.

Hope this helps and I hope MS sees this and fixes their Spooler so it won't
chew away forever on "weird" objects.