Print Spooler Service crashes Excel?

[Cayugagirl]

Hi,

I'm new here and thought I'd give this forum a try b/c I am completely befuddled.

First off, I'm an IT Manager running Active Directory using Win XP Pro.

In the past few days I've had two brand new dells crash Excel when their users try to open random files.

Sure, I thought the file might be corrupt. But it opened up under my profile without a problem. Naturally, I tried changing the user to have domain admin privileges but, same thing. The file starts to open and then crashes. No event is logged.

So today I turned off all services and startup items.

One by one I turned on the services until I found the culprit.

Print Spooler!

I'm at a complete loss. These two machines are completely up to date.

All files open with print spooler disabled, but of course, they can't print!

Has anyone had a similar experience or have any suggestions???

Thanks!

[cluberti]

Is the print spooler "clean", or does the user have print drivers installed? I've seen this before caused by HP Print Processors installed in the spooler (that are _completely unnecessary_, btw, for almost all day-to-day printing tasks). Consider that it isn't spoolsv.exe itself, but something running inside of it. Now, if the spooler is really clean, then that's something .

[Cayugagirl]

The user did have print drivers installed. None that are HP (thankfully!)

All Xerox.

I'm on the phone with Microsoft right now, i think it's related to the May 8th security update:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...n/ms07-may.mspx

They better hurry up tho, i've already had one glass of wine thanks to the tailspin this thing has left me in today!

[IcemanND]

I've had this kind of problem with both word and excel. fixing it involved reinstalling the print driver for the default printer.

[cluberti]

The user did have print drivers installed. None that are HP (thankfully!)

All Xerox.

I'm on the phone with Microsoft right now, i think it's related to the May 8th security update:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...n/ms07-may.mspx

They better hurry up tho, i've already had one glass of wine thanks to the tailspin this thing has left me in today!

Just be aware that if the update caused it, there'd be more reported cases of this, not to mention that the first time I saw this happen was many years ago.

It'll be the print drivers, or a need to reinstall the print drivers (Xerox drivers are also notorious, btw). Have you tried removing the print queues and uninstalling the drivers from the advanced options of the printers and faxes GUI?

[moo2004]

I've had this kind of problem with both word and excel. fixing it involved reinstalling the print driver for the default printer.

It also happened to me in outlook. Whenever I had moved the mouse cursor near the printer icon it crashed.

Try uninstall the printer from the add\remove programs and then check what happen with those excel files.

[Cayugagirl]

You guys were totally right.

It's the default printer.

It stumped me because I had four new machines and only the two that received the new updates from Tuesday exhibit the problem.

Unfortunately, the drivers are on print server so it looks like I've got some work to do tonight.

thanks for the help!

[severach]

I've had print spooler crashes with a Brother HL-1440. It crashes when you display Control Panel Printers and after the crash all printers including printers that aren't HL-1440 have disappeared. In my case the driver supplied on the CD worked and the web driver crashed. The crash was probably caused by a DLL written by Brother that the print spooler calls for advanced printer functionality.

If you bought one of those Dells that has 50 printers preinstalled I'd delete them and see if the spooler crashes stop. If you have just a few necessary printers you can delete them one by one until the crashes stop. I suspect you need to reboot after each crash to ensure that your spooler isn't mortally wounded from it's previous crash.