The printer spooler service SPOOLSS.EXE (SPOOLSV in Windows 2000) manages jobs sent to printers connected to Windows NT and Windows 2000 machines. (If you're printing to a remote or networked printer, the Spooler service on the machine which the remote printer is attached to will handle the job.)
On occasion, a print job may refuse to work correctly and may jam the print queue. Worse, it may be impossible to delete the print job through conventional means, i.e., by right-clicking on the job and selecting Cancel, or by selecting Cancel All Documents from the Printer menu. If this happens, it usually means the job itself is corrupt and must be deleted manually.
If you're trying to delete a stuck print job, take note of the job's approximate time and date. Then:
If you have too many "dead" spool files in the directory, you may also get this error whenever you try to print:
An appl
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ication error has occurred and an application error log is being generated.
SPOOLSS.EXE (SPOOLSV.EXE in Win2K)
Exception: access violation (0xc0000005), Address: <Hex address>
This indicates that the directory may be overloaded with printer spooler files and needs to be cleaned. Also check into the system's TEMP directories and remove any *.TMP files. These can also be an obstacle; some printer drivers use the TEMP directory for rasterization of print jobs.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Insight, (formerly the Windows Power Users Newsletter), a blog site devoted to hints, tips, tricks and news for users and administrators of Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Vista. He has more than 12 years of Windows experience under his belt, and contributes regularly to SearchWinComputing.com and SearchSQLServer.com.
