Comments on: How to cancel a print job that hangs under Windows Vista and XP

By: richard

richard — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:43:30 +0000

I just had the problem on windows 7. Simple file delete from the spooler after shutting down the service worked great. It didn’t event prompt to ask are you sure, are you really sure, didn’t ask me if I was happy for the experience, or if I wanted to send feedback. It just worked!

thanks for the tip.

By: Rxt

Rxt — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:05:38 +0000

Thanks for the tip. I was unable to delete a printer because of these jobs. I had to stop the spool service first, but then could remove all print jobs, and remove the printer.

By: Ilija Brajkovic

Ilija Brajkovic — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:25:43 +0000

Actually, I hope I will never have to cancel print job

By: Tony

Tony — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:19:14 +0000

You have to be real careful restarting the spooler service on a network during the day when you have lots of printers on the domain. If you restart the spooler you are effectively killing off all jobs from all printers. You’ll have staff queing up at the printers wondering where their print jobs are.

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:53:40 +0000

Ilija, I hope you’ll have the chance to try it soon By the way, nice blog.

Tony, that’s why I am always deleting all the files in the spooler directory before I restart the service. Thanks for mentioning psservice. It is a nice tool.

Nev, rebooting is pretty much the same as restarting the spooler service. If there are no print jobs in the queue that you want to keep, then you can delete all the files in the spooler directory. This always works.

Pete, you are right, this usually works if the printer is directly connected to the computer. However, if you print via network restarting the printer probably won’t help.

Anonymous, thanks for the tip. The advantage of net start over psservice is that is available on every computer.

By: Cómo cancelar un trabajo de impresión en Vista y XP | CyberHades

Cómo cancelar un trabajo de impresión en Vista y XP | CyberHades — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:05:44 +0000

[...] http://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-cancel-a-print-job-that-hangs-under-windows-vista-and-xp/ [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:42:45 +0000

Here is what I do:
1. Cancel the job (it then hangs at the ‘Deleting – Printing’ stage)
2. At the command prompt, enter: net stop spooler
3. Then enter: net start spooler
4. Bref F5 to refresh the status of the print queue

By: pete

pete — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 10:17:19 +0000

when this happens, i always turn off my printer and then turn it on again, works all the time..

By: nev

nev — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:04:48 +0000

Last time this happened to me was over a network print. Rebooted a few times but didn’t work, but oddly, restarting the Print Spooler I was able to delete the job from the queue.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:35:00 +0000

This works when you need that print job straight away but sometimes at the end of the day there are still jobs hanging that we dont know about. They end up annoying people the next day.

so…

I use “psservice.exe” from sysinternals and schedule it in the middle of the night to restart the print spooler service three times (every 10 minutes, because once is sometimes not enought to clear the hangs). When staff come to work the next day the spooler is clean and ready.

By: Ilija Brajkovic

Ilija Brajkovic — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:17:30 +0000

I hate this thing too, I’ll try this trick with Print Spooler Service next time. Thanks for this instruction.