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Event ID 76 — Shared Printer Availability

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Applies To: Windows Server 2008

Shared printer availability relates to whether shared printers are available on the network. When a printer is shared on the network, users with sufficient permissions can connect and print to the shared printer.

Event Details

Product: Windows Operating System
ID: 76
Source: Microsoft-Windows-PrintSpooler
Version: 6.0
Symbolic Name: MSG_UNSHARE_FAILED
Message: The print spooler failed to unshare printer %2 which is shared as %3. Error %1.

Resolve

Restart the print spooler and unshare the printer

To resolve this error, do the following:

  • Restart the Print Spooler service.
  • Unshare the printer.

Restart the Print Spooler service

To start or restart the Print Spooler service, use the following procedure:

Warning:** **Restarting the Print Spooler service causes all print jobs to be restarted. After restarting the Print Spooler service, you might need to reset some printers or turn them off and then turn them back on. On an active print server, perform this procedure outside of normal business hours or during scheduled maintenance time, if possible. Before performing this procedure, take all printers offline and wait for all print jobs to be completed, or pause all printers and wait for all Active print jobs to be completed.

  1. In the Administrative Tools folder, open the Services snap-in.

  2. Locate the Print Spooler service in the list of services, and then confirm that its status is Started. If its status is not Started, select the service and then click Start on the Action menu.

    Note: You can also do this from an elevated Command Prompt window by typing the following command: net stop spooler && net start spooler

In some instances, you might receive Error 1068 – "The dependency service or group failed to start" – when attempting to start the Print Spooler service. This can happen if the Print Spooler service relies on other services that are not running. To resolve this issue, use the following procedure:

  1. In the Services snap-in, right-click Print Spooler and then click Properties.
  2. Click the Dependencies tab. The first box lists all of the system services that must be running for the Print Spooler service to start. These are the dependencies.
  3. Make a note of each service, click OK, and then start each service that the Print Spooler service depends on, if the service is not already started. If a particular service is not already started, right-click it, click Properties, and then confirm that the Startup type is Automatic.

Unshare the printer

To unshare the printer, right-click its name in the Printers folder in Control Panel or in Print Management, click Run as administrator, click Sharing, and then clear the Share this printer check box.

To unshare a printer from the Command Prompt window, type the following command, where <printername> is the name of the printer: 

Cscript%WINDIR%\system32\Printing_Admin_Scripts\en-US\prncnfg.vbs -t -p "<printername>" -shared"

If the printer is not properly unshared, this could be because of network problems. Examine any new errors in Event Viewer to determine the underlying problem.

Verify

To verify that a printer is shared or unshared properly:

  1. Log on using a user account that has Print permissions to the print queue.
  2. Attempt to connect to the printer in Windows Explorer through its share name (for example, \\server1\printer1), or open the Command Prompt window and then type net view \\<servername>\<sharename>.

Shared Printer Availability

Printing Infrastructure