Suddenly, on a Windows Vista Business workstation I manage, the Windows print spooler service is consuming over 1GB of memory.

I got the call this morning that the user could not print. I discovered all printers were missing from the Printers applet in Control Panel. I rebooted the machine, and at first the printers were still missing, but after a few minutes (and much banging my head against the wall) they suddenly appeared.

I stopped worrying about it until later today it happened again to the same workstation.

To my knowledge, nothing has changed on the computer. No new printers have been added, no new print drivers would have been installed, and no new software is being used.

I tried clearing out the spooler folder (C:\Windows\System32\spooler\printers) which did have four print jobs from this morning, but the problem persists after restarting the spooler service. When starting the service, it starts out using 824 KB of memory, then after about 20 seconds it starts creeping up about 10MB each second until it stabilizes around 1.8GB.