Print Monitors gone after changing them in Autorun

micce 16 Reputation points
2022-08-05T05:21:37.627+00:00

Hi,
Mocking around (uncheck to disable) with printer monitors in Autorun64 (14.0.9.0). Got an errors "Failed to disable" from Autorun and when I was finished
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors was empty.
and also some strange repeated entries. 

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled\AutorunsDisabled

So, heads up on editing with this tool.

Sysinternals
Sysinternals
Advanced system utilities to manage, troubleshoot, and diagnose Windows and Linux systems and applications.
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  1. Greg Souders 6 Reputation points
    2022-10-02T01:52:23.44+00:00

    I confirm this as well. I messed up several workstations with this bug. When this happens, all printers are greyed out because their port is missing. You cannot add any new printers because a port cannot be created. I am working on recovering printers on the affected workstations. Mark Russinovich, I hope you see this and fix the problem.

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  2. micce 16 Reputation points
    2022-10-02T05:15:23.93+00:00

    Ping, @Mark Russinovich
    (I hope this is the Mark we're looking for... Not so experienced in the forum manner here, but is this how you bring it someone's attention?)

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  3. Greg Souders 6 Reputation points
    2022-10-04T17:29:02.933+00:00

    Hi Micce,

    I am not sure about the ping to Mark. However it seems the correct to me.

    I want to add some information about what happened to me. I was trying to remove some stubborn print drivers on several Windows 10 workstations. In my case I did not do an uncheck but a delete instead. This caused the entire registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors to be emptied. Thus resulting in all printers being greyed out. This is because there is no port association with the printers. It also caused adding a new port under print management to fail. This of course means that no new printers can be added.

    The only was I have been able to recover from this is to run a repair install keeping files and programs. I have done this on a couple of critical machines.

    I am hoping Mark will help with this because that is not an efficient way to correct this problem. I will try to ping him again...

    @Mark Russinovich

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