Unable to Remove Printers in Control Panel

I'm at my wits' end and don't know what to do next -- HELP!

I have Vista Home Premium on a 36-bit computer. I unstalled a local USB
Dell printer and it was working fine. Then it started printing tiny
letters, then stopped printing at all and printer icons disappeared
from the Control Panel.

I used Windows Update and installed Service Pack 1. The printer icons
are back, but there are now multiple copies of the printer which I'm
unable to delete. At restart, the printer prints the same page each
time.

I went into Services, stopped and restarted the spooler to no effect.
Would appreciate any thoughts on how to fix this.

 

right click on the printer
Run as administrator
Delete

Only the Owner can delete the printer when not running as administrator and
Plug and Play does not create the printer in the users context.

--
Alan Morris
Windows Printing Team
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base here:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

Thanks, Alan, I tried that before and it didn't work either. I'm the
only user on this machine and my account is set as administrator.

 

Make sure you delete any pending print jobs. The printer cannot be deleted
until the print jobs are deleted.

--
Alan Morris
Windows Printing Team
Search the Microsoft Knowledge Base here:
http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

 

I deleted all printing jobs from the queue, and stopped and restarted
the spooler. But when I restart the computer, the printer prints one of
my e-mail messages (same each time). Where else could a pending job be
"hiding"? Thanks for your help!

 

You might have to navigate to ...\spool\printers in Windows explorer and
delete all the file there if you have not already).

 

I manually deleted the files from the .../spool/printers folder -- BU
there are 2 persistent .shd files that won't delete ("file is in use"
even after reboot. Any ideas on how I can purge them? Many thanks

 

Try booting into safe mode and then try deleting them. I had a simila
issue with my printer and safe mode allowed me to delete the files

--
.Jo

_[image
http://uswave.net/vistax64/joetmvx64.png] (\"http://uswave.net/vistax64/joetmvx64.png\")_
_*::Vista_Forums::* (\"http://www.vistax64.com/\")_
_Geekbench_Score:_4031 (\"http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/51273\")_
_CPU-Z (\"http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=345866\")_

 

Booting in safe mode and deleting .shd files from .../spool solved th
problem! Thank you so much for your help