This might be a shot in the dark, but we recently created a new
windows print server running on Server 2003 R2, to take over for our
aged server 2000 print server. All the queues seem to work and you
can print to the printers on the new server just fine. However, we
have a very simple script that runs on various machines to add a
default printer. This script has always worked just fine with the old
server, but when we change the script to point to the new server (just
replacing the server name because the print queue names are the same
on both) we sometimes (NOTE I said SOMETIMES) get a script error of
"The remote procedure call failed". Also, if the script fails, and
you run it manually after finishing the logon (the script is a logon
script) then it will generally work fine.

We went round and round on this and finally ran a packet sniffer on
the traffic. One thing we noticed is that one the failed attempts,
the client seems to be trying to download a printer driver from the
new server. Hard to say from the packet capture if it was successful,
but we HAVE determined that even though the new server has a much
newer print driver, the clients always use the older driver they
apparently downloaded from the old server. We've also received
occasional reports of people adding printers from the new server and
not getting a driver properly.

My questions are this:

1.) Is there anything I need to do to allow the print server to
download drivers? Is there anything (permissions etc) that could
interfere with that?
2.) If a client has an older driver than the one the server has, will
it attempt to download the newer one? If so, how often will it
attempt it? Every time it tries to add the printer?

Aaron,
Do the users running the logon script have the right to install printer
drivers? (Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options)
In the Properties of the shared printer, under Additional Drivers, is there
a driver for the clients you have?
The driver should be downloaded from the server if it either does not exist
on the client or is older.
If that does not help, what are the clients and what is the printer that
fails?
Anthony,
http://www.airdesk.co.uk



"Aaron" <Aaron.Smith@kzoo.edu> wrote in message
news:76aa9224-cd14-4c28-9181-333ea59e56f1@u69g2000hse.googlegroups.com...

On Mar 27, 9:59 am, "Anthony [MVP]" <anth...@no-reply.com> wrote:
I've since learned that the users do NOT have the permission to
install printer drivers. Help desk folks basically go around with an
admin account and get the drivers installed. All of the client
machines are Windows XP Pro, SP2 and the drivers are checked under
"Additional Drivers". We actually tried to downgrade the driver (HP
Laserjet 4250 PCL 5e FYI) on the new server to the same driver version
as the old server and that seemed to help at first, and the number of
errors has definitely diminished, but we still get them occasionally.

OK, you can just use the policy to allow users to install printer drivers.
That should do it,
Anthony,
http://www.airdesk.co.uk

"Aaron" <Aaron.Smith@kzoo.edu> wrote in message
news:192b74f5-3a55-4b6c-b179-da938014f810@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...

On Mar 27, 6:11 pm, "Anthony [MVP]" <anth...@no-reply.com> wrote:
The problem we run in to with adding a printer via Group Policy is
that it allows you to add A printer, but there's no way to set that
printer as the default. We tried setting it up so that Group Policy
added the printer, and then the logon script would just set that
printer to the default, but the printer usually wouldn't show up right
away, and the script would attempt to make it the default before it
was there and error out....