My printer drivers are corrupt

I hate dealing with printers. I know a lot of system administrators feel the same way. We recently started to see an increase in printer related calls. Some of them turned out to be a real pain to fix. Almost as if the driver was corrupted. It had to be a system issue because our users are not administrators. We either push the printer out or they add it from the print server. Not much for them to mess up.

We had one printer related issue that took the team too long to fix, so I found myself in the middle of it. Not just fixing the problem but also calming down the customer. Although we mostly had her fixed, someone else on the same printer had just broken. The issue they had was the advanced options to their Xerox printer were not available. They could not change paper trays or print dual-sided. The types of issues that IT often does not see as a big deal but it is very important to the customer that it works.

I walked over to a third office where everything was working. I checked the driver and it was the same as the others. I then printed a test page from all three of them. Not only was the driver the same, it was even the same version number. But something very important jumped out to me. The list of dependent files only printed out from the computer that was working correctly. So it looked like they were missing all the additional printer driver files. 

I delete the printer and reconnected again for good measure and the test print was the same. I pulled up the printer management tool and tried to delete the driver, but it said it was in use. Access denied. Disconnected the printer and rebooted for good measure. It was still a problem. I finally got it removed by restarting the spooler and deleting the driver as fast as I could. It took me 5 attempts, but I got it. Connected to the printer and everything was working correctly. Did the same on the first broken user and it fixed them too.

Now I have a sure fire fix to the problem. It looks like IT witchcraft though. Stop spooler, start spooler, and delete driver. Repeat as needed. Sometimes it works the first time but most of the time it takes a few attempts. The user is usually sitting there with me.

Over the next few days, I fix a few more this same way. I want to dig into it deeper but printer drivers only break when someone need to print. The one day I had 3 break all within 10 minutes of each other near the end of the day. It was getting clear that we need to understand the issue better.

That very next day, one of the earlier users broke again. This time I made a copy of the spooler folder before the fix and after the fix. It turned out all the missing files were still there. Checksums were the same too. There goes the idea that the drivers are corrupt. For some reason Windows has the driver files but does not know it.

Edit: I was able to write a script to help with this issue: http://kevinmarquette.blogspot.com/2014/04/fixing-print-drivers-missing-dependent.html