Duplicate network printers Windows 10 and Windows 11

Question

Hello,

we need some advice on creating duplicate printers on windows 10 and windows 11 PCs.

We have network Canon printers, PCs with Windows 10 and Windows 11, we manage the printers via the print server (Windows Server 2019) and assign them using GPO. For some users, the printer will be duplicated after some time (week - month - 3months - never).

When duplicating, it happens that the printer is named in capital letters, otherwise everything is identical. If we remove the printer in the standard way, even the original one will stop working. Some printers have never been duplicated before.

These are different printers and different users, some have a problem with it, some do not.

We suspect that it duplicates the printer that the user has set as default, but it does not do it for all users.

What helped:

Stopping the print service, removing the duplicate printer keys - after that everything works for a while

Done:

Reinstalling the print server

Clean installs of both Windows 10 and Windows 11

Creating a special VLAN for printers

Windows does not manage printers

WSD disabled on printers

Answer 1

Hello there,

You might start with the profiles where the Duplicates were not created.

Can you share the Event ID you are getting while you run this process?

This thread explains a similar situation and the points discussed here might be helpful https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/194877/rds-w2019-default-printer-lost-on-session-disconne

You can also use tools like procmon to identify the root cause.

Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry, and process/thread activity. You can get the tool from here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

Hope this resolves your Query !!

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