Y'know they way windows print queues will occasionally stop working with a print job at the head of the queue which just won't print and which you can't delete? Anyone know whats going on when this happens?

I've been seeing this since the NT4 days and it still happens on 2008. I'm talking about standard IP connected laser printers - nothing fancy. I support a lot of servers and loads of workstations and see this happen a few times a year.

The user will call saying they can't print. When you examine the print queue, which in my case will generally be a server based queue shared out to the workstations, you find a print job which you cannot cancel. You also can't pause it, reinitialize it, nothing.

Stopping the spooler is the usual trick and works sometimes. However I occasionally see cases which even this doesn't cure and which a reboot is the only solution. Pause the queue, reboot, when it comes back up the job can then be deleted. Once gone the printer happily goes back to its normal state. No action is ever necessary on the printer.

I regard having to reboot as last resort and don't like it. What on earth can be going on when stopping the process (spooler) and restarting it doesn't clear a problem?

Its not linked to any manufacturer either. I've seen this on HPs, lexmark, canon, ricoh, on lasers, on plotters.... can't say I ever saw this on dot matrix.

Anyone got any ideas as to what may be going on.

Ian