Windows xp group policy printers

Log directory pruning retry events: Specifies whether to log events when the pruning service on a domain controller tries to contact a computer before it prunes the computer's printers.

The pruning service periodically contacts computers that have published printers to verify that the printers are still available for use. If a computer does not respond to the contact attempt, the attempt is retried a specified number of times, at a specified interval. The Directory pruning retry setting determines the number of times that the attempt is retried.

The default value is two retries. The Directory Pruning Interval setting determines the time interval between retries.

The default value is eight hours. If the computer has not responded by the last contact attempt, its printers are pruned from the directory. Pre-populate printer search location text: Enables the physical Location Tracking setting for Windows printers. Use Location Tracking to design a location scheme for your enterprise and assign computers and printers to locations in the scheme. Location Tracking overrides the standard method that is used to locate and associate computers and printers.

The standard method uses a printer's IP address and subnet mask to estimate its physical location and proximity to computers. If you enable this setting, users can browse for printers by location without knowing the printer's location or location naming scheme. By default, if you enable the Group Policy Computer location setting, the default location that you entered appears in the Location field.

Printer Browsing: If you enable this setting, the print subsystem announces shared printers for printer browsing. You should disable this setting if you do not want the print subsystem to add shared printers to the browse list. If this setting is not configured, shared printers are not added to the browse list if a Directory service is available but are added if a Directory service is unavailable. Prune printers that are not automatically republished: This setting determines whether printers can be pruned from the directory.

It is usually best to leave this setting unconfigured. However, if you find that printers are being pruned even though the computer from which they are published is functioning and on the network, you can enable this policy to prevent the pruning service from deleting the published printers during network outages or situations in which dial-up links that are up only intermittently are used.

To prevent printers from being removed from Active Directory, enable this policy, and retain the default selection of Never in the Prune non-republishing printers list.

Web-based printing: This policy bit is designed for administrators to disable Internet printing entirely. When this policy bit is selected, none of the shared printers on the server are published to the web, and none of the shared printers are able to accept incoming jobs from other clients by using HTTP.

MSC, and then press Enter. Right-click the newly created Group Policy Object, and then click Edit. This opens Group Policy Management Editor. The following additional settings can be enabled under Computer Configuration :.

Add Printer wizard - Network scan page Managed network : This policy sets the maximum number of printers of each type that the Add Printer wizard will display on a computer on a managed network when the computer is able to reach a domain controller for example, a domain-joined laptop on a corporate network. Add Printer wizard - Network scan page Unmanaged network : This policy sets the maximum number of printers of each type that the Add Printer wizard will display on a computer on an unmanaged network when the computer is not able to reach a domain controller for example, a domain-joined laptop on a home network.

Always render print jobs on the server: When printing through a print server, determines whether the print spooler on the client will process print jobs itself or pass them on to the server to do the work.

This policy setting affects printing to a Windows print server only. Execute print drivers in isolated processes: This policy setting determines whether the print spooler will execute print drivers in an isolated or separate process. When print drivers are loaded in an isolated process or isolated processes , a print driver failure will not cause the print spooler service to fail.

Extend Point and Print connection to search Windows Update: This policy setting allows you to manage where client computers search for Point and Print drivers. If you enable this policy setting, the client computer will continue to search for compatible Point and Print drivers from Windows Update after it fails to find the compatible driver from the local driver store and the server driver cache. Only use Package Point and print: This policy restricts client computers to use package point and print only.

If this setting is enabled, users will be able to point and print only to printers that use package-aware drivers. When using package point and print, client computers will check the driver signature of all drivers that are downloaded from print servers. Override print driver execution compatibility setting reported by print driver: This policy setting determines whether the print spooler will override the Driver Isolation compatibility that is reported by the print driver. This enables executing print drivers in an isolated process even if the driver does not report compatibility.

If you enable this policy setting, the print spooler will ignore the Driver Isolation compatibility flag value that is reported by the print driver. Package Point and print - Approved servers: Restricts package point and print to approved servers.

This policy setting restricts package point and print connections to approved servers. This setting applies only to Package Point and Print connections and is completely independent from the "Point and Print Restrictions" policy that governs the behavior of non-package point and print connections. Clinet that are running Windows Vista or a later version of Windows will try to make a non-package point and print connection any time that a package point and print connection fails. This includes attempts that are blocked by this policy.

Administrators may have to set both policies to block all print connections to a specific print server. If this setting is enabled, users will be able to package point and print only to print servers that are approved by the network administrator. Point and Print Restrictions: This policy setting controls the client Point and Print behavior, including the security prompts for Windows Vista computers.

The policy setting applies only to non-Print Administrator clients, and only to computers that are members of a domain. When the policy setting is enabled, the following conditions obtain:. Windows XP and later clients will only download print driver components from a list of explicitly named servers.

Now, are the drivers the latest driver out there But I was able to deploy them on my computer running Win7 x86 about 2 months ago without any issues.

My issues only started after promoting the domain to R2 level. Today I've been testing it out with a R2 print server and so far it is working without any issues. Now, I don't see why I would need the latest server OS to get the printer deployment working again unless Microsoft just wanted some extra money, but it is working. I probably spent a week or more trying to get the R2 print server working to no prevail through GP.

I will keep testing the GP printer deployment with the new print server, but I really wish I found the reason it stopped working on the old one. The UAC window indicates the Point and Print Restrictions policy is not configured, or enabled to display the prompts that will stop Group Preferences Printer stuff from working. Once you correct the policy configuration, I would expect the printer connections.

When using any driver that included in Server or R2, the drivers are signed packages and the client is not prompted for driver downloads. Alan you bring up something I haven't though of "When using any driver that included in Server or R2, the drivers are signed packages and the client is not prompted for driver downloads. Is it not working because I'm not using the drivers included in R2?

I need to deploy copiers and those drivers are more than the standard drivers since they do so much more. Also, say I do use the driver included in R2, where do I find the x86 driver? They must be the same driver otherwise you can't deploy the x86 driver.

Are they kept in the OS somewhere? If you are getting the prompt for driver downloads, you are disabling the wrong policy or the domain policy is not getting applied to the machines.

When using a print driver that is included in R2, Window 7 client machines that have the same driver set will install from the local driver store rather than the print server. That should be installed on Vista and Windows 7 32bit client machines. Back me up a step, please. I, too, have the issue where Windows 7 users are prompted to install the driver for printers.

I install printers through logonscript. So, if someone can shed light on why I cannot see the Computer Configuration settings, I'd be much obliged. The templates loaded in the central store were out of date. Having updated them, I can now see the Point and Print settings for Windows 7.

I have exactly this problem. Many many thanks. Has there not been any resolve to this yet? I have attempted all listed above. I am able to get two HP printers to deploy with GPO in user preferences mode, but with my Ricoh MP C I get the error about " Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code '0xbcb The specified printer driver was not found on the system and needs to be downloaded.

I have done all the above about updating central store to WIN 7 admx, disabled and enabled those listed changes above in previous reply's. I have also deleted the GPO, deleted the printers, deleted the drivers, reinstalled drivers, updated drivers, reinstalled printer, search for printer by UNC instead of browsing. What is strange is that it works for two of my printers as I stated but fails on the Ricoh.

This is very frustrating and that could have saved a lot of time just going around and adding the printers manually from each desktop. When the print driver is package aware on Server and greater, the print driver will install on the client without any user prompts. If the print server is and package aware drivers will be installed using legacy install and will no longer contain the digital signature.

Is the print server 64bit? Is there a 64bit print driver installed using the same name as the 32bit driver if the server is 32bit? Why would it deploy via that Group Policy setting in Printer Managment and not the Preferences method? Deployed Printer client will download the driver since it is aware of spooler policies. So most likely this Policy is not properly configured. The Deployed Printer component is a spooler team feature.

The Group Policy Preferences is a group policy team feature. The client component is different and I do not know how GPP works. Why both features? Microsoft purchased the GPP stuff for inclusion in Server I'm sure it was more complex than that , and the spooler team had already released printer specific deployment in R2 as well as Vista. I'm sure the group that determines product features will figure out the duplication of features some day and make a call on this.

Try to deploy your printers directly via the printserver - server manager - select printserver - printers. I've done some testing on this with R2 schema level R2 and Windows 7 bit. I've finally come up with repeatable results and some odd ones. On the server, I created three printers, all using the HP universal print driver printer one, printer two, printer three.

From the W7 box, I added the x64 driver to the print server. I shared two of the printers this way, using item level targeting to send the printer to two different users - one printer each. I didn't add the third printer this way. I only created the shared printer, I didn't touch any other GP settings. At this point, the printers still don't deploy successfully. That didn't give the granular control you get with user preferences.

So based on that and much trial and error, I found that if I had deployed the third printer using Print Management and then immediately removed it using Print Management, all of the user preference printers would deploy from that point forward, including any new ones. I don't know what's happening there, but once a printer has been deployed using Print Management, you can deploy all you want using user preferences. To clarify, I only deployed printer three using the Print Management and then immediately un-deployed it.

Printer three was never deployed using user preferences. In essence, I needed to deploy a dummy printer using Print management and then all of the user preference printers worked. I can't explain why this works, but I was able to reproduce the results several times. I used VMs so I could rollback and start fresh for each scenario. I can provide more details if anyone cares. That's easy, Group Policy Preferences never creates the connection because the prompt for driver downloads is supressed as indicated in the event log error in GPP.

Using Deployed Printers installs the driver from the server when the connection is created. Once you have the driver GPP can create the connection.

Configure your Computer Point and Print restrictions as stated previously. I do not recommend disabling the policy. It does make sense that the driver gets deployed by using the user policy instead of prefs. To revise my post above which still provides a working solution, but adds an odd step with new information:. I tried various combination of this and this turned out to be the only working combination. Note that I never deployed the printer using Print Management.

Here is a solution for Windows 7 64bit 32bit works fine with the information persented here. If I use any other group, even Everyone, it does not work.

I also have point and print restrictions disabled and 64bit drivers installed on the 32bit print server. However this breaks your ability to control who can print to a specific printer using AD groups. I might burn a Microsoft tech call over this to see if I can get MS to offer a fix for it. These drivers both bit and bit are downloaded from vendor site and installed on our printserver. After applying above steps, some printers were automatically applied when users log in.

Some printer would not. I checked the Event Logs. In the Application logs I notices warning messages for those printers which did not apply via GP. Rebooted PC's, and all worked. I had created a single GPO to handle deployment to any Windows 7 machine, disabling the Computer section, and using item level targeting to filter which printer is deployed to each User via AD security group membership.

This did not work. Leaving the GPP settings the way I created them, I then used the "deploy via group policy" thing on the print server, pointing each printer 12 of them at the one GPO. This pushed ALL the printers to my test machine, despite the test User account only being in a couple of the AD security groups made for each printer. Ask a question. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. Group Policy. Sign in to vote. Any help would be much appreciated Thank you.

Tuesday, February 15, PM.