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How to manually remove stuck printer jobs from a Windows based print server

Submitted by soccerfiend on Tue, 2010-12-21 14:53

As it turns out, this is a pretty straight forward thing to do.

First we stop the the print spooler. I like doing this from the command line like so:

  1. net stop spooler

but you can just as easily stop the spooler from the "Services" control panel applet.

The next step is to delete the temporary files that store the data that is to be sent to the printer:

  1. del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.shd
  2. del %systemroot%\system32\spool\printers\*.spl

Finally we restart the print spooler, again from the CLI:

  1. net start spooler

Credit where credit is due, this info I pulled from http://www.ghacks.net/2008/12/11/how-to-deal-with-stuck-print-jobs/ There were a lot of results when I search Google, but this one went straight to the point (I like that).

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