Greetings. I apologize if this is the wrong forum but it seems related to Windows 7 since I was able to do this in XP.

Our printers are all installed on a Win2K3 server and I deploy them to our users through group policy. I have a user using Windows 7 64bit and she is having problems with her printer and I was going to remove the printer and driver and reinstall. In XP, I would just be able to right click and delete the printer, then delete the driver, do a gpupdate /force and reboot and they'd get a fresh driver.

But in Win7, it is not allowing me to do that. When I try to delete the printer from the computer (even when logged in as member of the administrators group, I get the message "Access is denied, unable to remove device" Since I can't delete the printer, I can't delete the driver.

I've googled this with no luck. I've found one hit that describes the problem exactly...but no solution is given.

I suspect it's some Group Policy setting I need to update for Win7...but I'm not having any luck finding anything that would apply.

Thanks in advance!

By "Administrators" group, do you mean Domain Admins group in Active Directory, or are you using a domain account that is a member of the local Administrators group?

By "Administrators" group, do you mean Domain Admins group in Active Directory, or are you using a domain account that is a member of the local Administrators group?

domain account that is a member of the local Administrators group.

our AD is such that we don't have control over the domain, we are given an OU on the domain and we put our own OUs and workstation/server/user/etc objects under that.

The server that the printers are installed on are ours, as are the workstations, but the domain we put them on is not ours to control. The GP objects are created and maintained by us

Edited June 17, 201016 yr by VoodooV

You might want to remove the machine or the user from the OU that's applying the printer(s) (a test OU with all inheritance blocked and no GPOs is usually the best way to do this), and then gpupdate /force and try to remove it. It's very possible that the driver/queue is locked by policy processing.

You might want to remove the machine or the user from the OU that's applying the printer(s) (a test OU with all inheritance blocked and no GPOs is usually the best way to do this), and then gpupdate /force and try to remove it. It's very possible that the driver/queue is locked by policy processing.

Thanks! I'll give that a try this afternoon. It's not just this one computer, it seems all of our Windows 7 computers that have printers deployed by GPO have this issue. Assuming that moving the computer object to a different OU that has inheritance blocked clears this up, How would I fix this for the future?

Also, the printers are deployed on a per-computer basis if that helps at all.

The only other thing you might try is to procmon trying to delete the printer to see if something's got locks on files or reg keys, for instance.