Unable to Remove Printers in Control Panel

[mishutka]

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.

[Alan Morris [MSFT]]

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.

[mishutka]

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.

[Alan Morris [MSFT]]

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

[mishutka]

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!

[Tom Ferguson]

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

[mishutka]

I manually deleted the files from the .../spool/printers folder -- BUT 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!

[.Joe]

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

[mishutka]

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