A Windows System Admin's Blog

Covering Server Administration, Endpoint Management, Scripting and Network Management

Default printer changes after Terminal Server (or print spooler service) restart

Just a quick post today.  I was troubleshooting an issue where a user would set a default network printer (say Printer01) in their user profile, upon a server restart (which happens nightly) their printer would be set back to the Adobe PDF local printer.  After going through event logs and some basic troubleshooting through Group Policy I quickly came to the conclusion that this was more of a user profile issue than a deployment one.

After a bit of Google-foo, I found that Windows stored user based printer connection details in the registry under HKEY_USERS\<user SID here>\Printers\Connections.  It also stored local settings for each printer under HKEY_USERS\<user SID here>\Printers\Settings.  I went through the printer keys under each registry key and found printers that no longer existed.

Simply deleting printers that were no longer available let the user set a default printer and the setting stayed after a server or print spooler service reboot.

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