How to disable automatic scaning for printers in Windows 11 print dialog?

Question

Hi,

We are a company with approximately 1,000 computers in Active Directory (AD). Most of these computers are running Windows 10, and we are currently in the process of upgrading to Windows 11. This upgrade has proven to be quite challenging. Many of our Group Policy Objects (GPOs) are not being respected, and in some cases, they are causing system issues.

Our most significant problem at the moment is related to the printing dialog. When opening the printing dialog from any .NET application, it automatically starts searching for Web Services on Devices (WSD) printers on the network. This becomes problematic as we have around 300 printers with WSD.

I have tried all the standard policies that worked on Windows 10, 8, and 7. Interestingly, this issue does not occur in the old control panel, and the system does not install the printers it finds unless a user clicks on them.

Is there a policy or setting that disables this feature that I might be missing?

Thank you! :)

Answer 1

Hi Matěj Vajnar Vajny.cz,

Thank you for posting in the Microsoft Community Forums.

In the Group Policy Editor, select New Group Policy to connect to the user group you want to deny automatic scanning of printers. Then navigate to:

Group Policy > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Printers.

Then turn off the relevant options in the right-hand window, e.g. "Block adding printers".

Once the above configuration is complete, the Add Printer button will be removed from the Devices and Printers window, but this will not completely prevent users from adding printers. Users can still add printers in other ways (e.g. by installing the driver manually or using other tools).

After applying the Group Policy changes, make sure that the policy updates are applied to the target computer or user group.

Test that the changes work as expected, i.e. check that users can no longer automatically add network printers.

Best regards

Neuvi Jiang

Answer 2

Hi,

Thank you for your response. However, I think there might be a misunderstanding regarding my issue. The problem is not about users adding printers through the control panel. The issue occurs when trying to print with custom settings (Hope thats the correct english name for this function) in Windows 11, where it automatically searches for network printers. Given that most of our printers are the same model, users are confused about which printer is theirs, and having that many printers listed looks problematic.

The issue is precisely what I showed in the screenshot in my original post.

Regarding the GPO, I tried disabling "Browse the network to find printers," which, by its name, should disable the functionality I want. Unfortunately, it does not resolve the issue.

I believe the problem is that the new UI of the printing dialog is entirely separate from the original control panel, causing it to ignore the GPO settings under Administrative Templates/Control Panel.

Any further assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Answer 3

So I fixed it by disabling the new print dialog in registry.

reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Print\UnifiedPrintDialog" /v "PreferLegacyPrintDialog" /d 1 /t REG_DWORD /f