Remote desktop to particular server tries to send print job

Question

We have a domain network with about 30 computers and an active directory on Windows Server SBS 2003 32bit. Whenever I connect to this server from any other machine, it automatically attempts to send some sort of print job. It fails to print however and the printer never seems to receive the job. I have been seeing this happen on every computer which connects to this particular server. It seems to send these print jobs repeatedly, and to different printers, if more than one are installed. As soon as I cancel one print job, it starts another, repeats a few times and finally stops.

What could be going on here?

PS - I originally thought this was related to MS OneNote but this turns out to happen on computers which do not have OneNote.

Solution

Looks like I was pretty close with my comment up there: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officeitpro/thread/fdb951e5-82a4-46a0-8a74-5677b18094d6 shows others with the same issue.

If you don't need to tunnel printing through the Remote Desktop connection, you can untick the Printers checkbox in the Local Resources tab of mstsc.exe's options.

If you do need Remote Desktop printer redirection, you're likely out of luck until MS fix the OneNote driver, but http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911913 suggests a registry setting that might prevent this, if the "Send To OneNote" 'printer' is not set as your default printer (it should work out of the box in Win2008+ but the KB article suggests a hotfix is needed for Win2003 in order to honour this registry setting — make sure you perform due diligence before you install it):

1. Open regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR
3. Create a new DWORD value (or edit the existing one) called RedirectDefaultPrinterOnly
4. Set its value to 1
5. Set any other printer in your printers list to be the default

Of course, if you need to print from the server and your network is small/manageable enough, you can probably just connect to the printers you need, directly on the server, and disable Printer Redirection for that server altogether:

1. On the server, open regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\Wds\rdpwd
3. Create a new DWORD value (or edit the existing one) called fEnablePrintRDR
4. Set its value to 0

If the registry-editing-on-the-server-stuff seems a bit too dangerous, maybe try the Local Security Policy options that do the same: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731963%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

Comments

[jimbobmcgee]

Some thoughts/guesses: if you pick a book, what printout does it appear to add to OneNote? Do you have a 'Print to OneNote' type option that would normally open OneNote and ask you which book you wanted to use (sorry, not familiar with OneNote, so can't verify for myself)? If so, at the first dialog for Remote Desktop, where you enter the target computer name, expand Options and check the Local Resources tab. Are you sharing printers? If so, it could be that the RDP printer-sharing feature is triggering the OneNote driver as part of its setup.

[Rhys Evans]

why voted me down?!

[Lumberjack]

Because (no offense intended, but) it is a bad answer. This is a problem that is caused by One Note, and restarting the spooler will do nothing to help.