Microsoft Print to PDF stops working on 2016 RDSH after installing KB4586830

Question

I have a deployment of 7 2016 RDSH servers.
After installing KB4586830 Microsoft Print to PDF and Microsoft XPS Write stops working.
If I uninstall KB4586830 it fixes the issue.

Does anyone have a solution other than uninstalling the security patches?

Answer 1

We are experiencing the same problems - AGAIN - with 2021-10 Cumulative Update for Windows Server 2016 (KB5006669). Farm with Windows Server 2016 / RDS + Citrix 7.15CU8. Microsoft Print to PDF is required by one of our published applications. We already rebuilt the entire farm before because of the same problem with previous updates.

Uninstalling 2021-10 CU does temporarily resolve the issue but that's obviously no valid solution - especially not on a host used remotely by a lot of users.

Answer 2

Unreal, I have been messing with this all day and this worked. Thank you very much.

Answer 3

Not sure if this is the exact same issue, but we had various Print to PDF and Type-4 driver installation issues. I posted what resolved it for me, here- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/214615/microsoft-print-to-pdf-not-working-after-windows-u.html

Here are my notes on what worked for us-

One thing I noticed was that the ntprint.inf file was referencing ntprint.inf_x86... for the active driver reference on the problematic machine, ntprint.inf_x64... on a working machine

I did the following and so far printing is back to normal for Type-4 drivers-

1- ran "pnputil /enum-drivers" from a command prompt
2- used psexec to elevate and run regedit as system
3- investigated the - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\DRIVERS\DriverDatabase\DriverInfFiles\ntprint.inf
4- updated the (Default) value to include - ntprint.inf_x86_6fbb4b09e9354bf2 and ntprint.inf_amd64_6fbb4b09e9354bf2
5- updated the Active value to - ntprint.inf_amd64_6fbb4b09e9354bf2

Note- the exact values of ntprint.inf_x86 and _64 might be specific to build or updates installed, I'm not sure that they are universal to 2016. I used the values that existed in the DriverStore - C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository on my servers.

Not sure if this fix will do the trick long term, but so far after scrubbing out old printers, drivers, and pretty much cleaning out all registry / driver on the server its the only thing that has looked promising. Hopefully this will help point someone else in the right direction.

To recap the issue we had- On six Windows 2016 RDS session hosts last year, printing worked fine until April time frame and none of the Print to PDF or installing any printer with a type-4 driver would work. We would always get "Element not found" June 2020 we rebuilt new fully patched Windows Server 2016 RDS session hosts and the problem was resolved until 2 months ago when the exact thing happened again! Very frustrating. With limited testing at this point, editing the ntprint.inf entry in the registry seems to have resolved.

Answer 4

Just a little update that may help us collectively troubleshoot this. I am almost certain that this is due to a WSUS database corruption on the effected systems. I am getting WSUS errors when running the troubleshooter on the effected machine and not on our others. When you attempt to resolve the issue with the troubleshooter, it fails to resolve the error. Have pursued a DISM health restore, deleted the contents of software distribution folders, and reset and reauthorized the WSUS communication without success. If anyone else can verify that their effected machines have this error, we might be able to find a way around the issue (with the help of someone smarter than myself haha). As of right now, this is still a totally random and insanely frustrating problem for those managing and supporting remote work environments.

Answer 5

Hi,

Please check below thread Unexpected results when printing from some apps after installing updates released March 9, 2021 or March 15, 2021 and try the fix.