Patrick Domingues

In this tutorial you will be shown how to fix printer shares after PrintNightmare patches are installed. The PrintNightmare patches have been the bane of my existence and I’m sure others have felt its pain as well. There is many articles going about how to remove the patches to resolve the issue but we need to move forward with patches in place and not remove patches to resolve the issue. 

Step 1

Make sure to update all your servers and workstations with the latest patches.

Step 2

Log into your Active Directory / Domain Controller Server.

1. Take note, I am assuming you would have a dedicated policy for your printers. 
2. Click Start.
3. Type gpedit.msc and press Enter to open the Group Policy Editor.
4. Locate and delete the existing printer policy or policy’s.

Step 3

Now log into the server that has the print management services installed and printers are shared from.

1. Click Start.
2. Type Print Management and press Enter to open Print Management Window.
3. Locate and click on Deployed Printers. Take note of their names and IP addresses.
4. Remove and uninstall all shared printers from the server.
5. Click on All Drivers and remove all associated drivers to those printers.
   (If you are getting an error you may have to do a little trick of stopping and stating print spooler service and right away deleting the driver for it to be removed)
6. Reboot Server.
7. Download latest drivers for your printers.
8. Install and share your printers using latest drivers and try to use a variant of the previous printer name if possible.

Step 4

Log into your Active Directory / Domain Controller Server.

1. Click Start.
2. Type gpedit.msc and press Enter to open the Group Policy Editor.
3. Create a new Printer Policy or Policy’s using a variant of the previous policy name if possible.
4. Edit your printer policy and Navigate to the path : Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Printers
5. Double-click the Point and Print Restrictions to open the policy

   

6. Select option Enabled.
7. Select Show warning and elevation prompt option for “When installing drivers for a new connection” setting under Options
8. Select the Show warning and elevation prompt option for “When updating drivers for an existing connection” setting under options.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Assign your new Print Policy’s to your Organizational Units.

Step 5

Log into the server that has the print management services and printers installed.

1. Click Start.
2. Type Print Management and press Enter to open Print Management Window.
3. Select All Printers folder right click each printer and select Deploy with Group Policy.
4. Correspond each printer to the new printer group policy that you created.
5. Send a gpupdate /force to all the workstations.

Step 6

Now with all the workstations we may need to do some leg work.

1. Make sure gpupdate /force has been ran on all workstations.
2. If old printers are still there remove all printers even the new and reboot.
3. Log in as the user and confirm only new printers are on the printer list. 

Note: If you run into an issue where old printers are still being deployed even when old policy was removed, review the following: How to remove domain group policy from a windows computer

I hope this article was helpful, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. If you would like to be notified of when I create a new post, you can subscribe to my blog alert.

Patrick Domingues

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