Printer Server Migration Remove Old Printer Mappings on Clients

Question

I just finished migrating printers from an old windows server to a new 2022 server. The problem the environment is a mess and the printers were listed in Printer Server Manager as Deployed to both user and computers. Of course they were not deployed using group policy preference. Anyway, I am now stuck with removing the old printer mappings on clients but running into the following. When I run a PowerShell command to remove printer that were from the old print server, it runs and when I list all printers in Powershell the printers are gone. Yet the printers remain in Control Panel -> Printers. I have run the Powershell command has Administrator and System with the same result and even restarted the printer spooler service. I tried some suggestions online about targeting the registry but that didn't work either.

Any idea what is going on here. Is the issue the fact the printers were mapped to the users and computer... not my doing in the past. What is the best way to clean this up? At this point I am not even worried about the users default printer since that is more of a headache to script and least from what I found.

Answer 1

Hello,

Have you ever tried deleting a registry key? Since you mentioned that you don't deploy printers via GPO, you should check this directory:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows x64\Drivers

If it works for you, you can use scripts to remove them from other PCs.

---

If the Answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and upvote it.