Clearing out corrupt print jobs

Corrupt print jobs are a weekly occurance here when using BlueZone Terminal Emulation. Blue zone has this nice little feature when printing to allow print jobs to go through a serial device (one on a terminal server or locally on a serial port) or through the Windows API. This would be a great asset when having to use older impact printers to do carbon coppies. On the other hand, only about 15 out of the 300 workstations I administer have serial printers.

Now here is where the problem lies. When you send a serial job to a windows API driver, it dosnt print out a bunch of jibberish, instead it completly locks up the driver. anything printed after the corrupt job will sit behind it in the queue. The recomended way to clear out the print jobs is to delete the job ands then power cycle the printer. This is usually time consuming for network printers and sometimes does not work for local printers. Therefore I must usually manually delete the print job.

To do this:

1. Open Run and type in services.msc
2. Find Windows Print Spooler and stop it temporally
3. Open run again and type in c:\windows\system32\spool\printers
4. Delete everything in this folder (these are the print jobs)
5. Go back to the services window and start the print spooler

And there you have it! One squeeky clean print spooler!