When print drivers go bad (and techs get rusty)

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Bear with me, this is rant, not a request for UI. So yeah, I had a little problem with every single fucking Vista computer on my network. Not a single one of them could connect a shared printer from another one. All machines, as server or client, and all printers are affected.

My responses are in italics:

You could see the printer shares, but trying to connect would give a:

0x00000709 which is NT error PRINTER_NAME_INVALID, but you won't tell me that, will you?
Windows cannot connect to the printer O RLY?
Make sure that you have typed the name correctly I didn't have to, I clicked on it.. can YOU not spell?
and that the printer is connected to the network ...what.. I ..couldn't SEE it if it wasn't, now could I???

... nothing in the event log, nothing on the server side... and every computer in the house is doing this. Not good.

There is nothing useful on teh Intarwebs about this... jsut a lot of people with the same problem and no real fix...

I have literally spent a day on this, going so far as to

- system restore my desktop into oblivion
- Wipe and reload a "sacrificial goat", AKA my laptop. After a clean reload, the laptop can connect to the desktop's printer, but if I share the printer off the laptop, the desktop can't connect... so it's a client side problem that needs a rebuild to fix? Fuckity great. I do NOT want to have to do that to my desktop, and I CAN'T do that to SWMBO's laptop. (It's an Acer and I don't trust the recovery DVDs)
- Put a fist-sized dent in the drywall. Not kidding. Easier to fix than anything else I could have hit.

... then I kind of realized I was just whacking around... I'm rusty on the deep Windows magic. I tried to remember some of the stuff I did when I was a windows tech. I took a different approach, and figured it out in 5 minutes:

Fire up Procexp
Look at what DLLs spoolsv is loading
Goddamn thing is still loading the Kodak EASYSHARE 5000 print monitor DLL, even though I though that printer had been uninstalled and the driver removed.
Rip it out of the registry and restart the spooler.

Problem solved, now put me in my straitjacket and wheel me away. Talk about getting rusty. I used to think of solutions like this a lot quicker. I've been working with 100% Linux for a few years now, and it shows.

I can't say I truly hate Windows, but I have always hated windows printer drivers...