Windows Server 2022 Does Not Work With Ricoh C6000 Printer

Question

I have an installation of Windows Server 2022 that will not send print jobs to a Ricoh C6000 printer. A similar system running Windows Server 2019 on the same network will install the printer with no issues using the same driver provided by Ricoh. On the 2022 system, all print jobs sit indefinitely in the print queue and eventually time out. The configuration of these two systems seems to be similar except for the Windows Server version. I have also successfully installed this printer on a workstation running Windows 10 and 11 on this same network with no issues. The printer must be installed on the system running Windows Server 2022 however.

The Windows Server 2022 system is able to communicate with the printer in all other ways: it can ping the printer and login to the printer through the web interface with no issues. If the printer is installed on the Windows Server 2022 system as a generic IPP device it is able to send print jobs, but all of the features of the advanced Ricoh printer are unavailable so this does not work. I have compared the Server 2019 and 2022 systems side-by-side and couldn't see any noticeable differences to their configurations.

I have tried all the usual troubleshooting steps: reinstall driver, use a different/older driver, use universal driver from Ricoh/Windows, restart print spooler service, restart system after printer install, completely wipe and reinstall print driver, check/disable all firewall settings, check/confirm all settings on the Ricoh printer itself. We have done extensive network testing: packet captures from the router and from the Windows Server 2022 system; both see no traffic when sending print jobs. However, traffic is observed when pinging and logging into the printers web interface as expected.

The system is running inside a virtual machine managed by Hyper-V. When installing the printer directly on the host machine the same behavior is observed: the print jobs stay in the queue indefinitely as well.

Related information:

• printer: Ricoh IM C6000
• driver: version 3.0.0 PCL 6
• OS: Windows Server 2022 Standard
• OS Version: 10.0.20348
• System is domain joined

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

Update: I created a new VM on the same host as the Server 2022 system running Server 2019. This VM is able to install the printer and print successfully. The host system is also running Windows Server 2022. At this point I am fairly certain this is a bug within Windows Server 2022 itself. Hopefully someone can chime in, perhaps I'm overlooking something here.

Answer 2

Hello,

Based on the troubleshooting steps you have tried, the network connection between the server and the printer is fine, but no data is flowing to the printer when the print job is sent, which could be a problem with the server's configuration or print service.

Try the following steps on the server:

1. Clear the Enable advanced printing features check box on the Advanced tab of the property sheet of the printer.
2. Check the Spool folder to see whether it contains any old files. The default Spool folder is  %systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers.
3. Reset the Print Spooler on the client, and then try again.

In addition, has the system been updated recently? Tryremoving the installed update to see if the problem reappears. 

 References:

Troubleshooting scenarios for printing - Windows Server | Microsoft Learn

Resolved issues in Windows Server 2022 | Microsoft Learn

I hope this helps.

Best regards

Jacen

Answer 3

Thank you for the reply Jacen, it's greatly appreciated!

Clear the Enable advanced printing features check box on the Advanced tab of the property sheet of the printer.

I tried unchecking this and printing, the print jobs still sit in the queue and time out eventually.

Check the Spool folder to see whether it contains any old files. The default Spool folder is  %systemroot%\System32\Spool\Printers.

This folder did contain nearly 8,500 temp files, even when all the installed print queues were empty. I deleted all files in this directory and restarted the print spooler service. Interestingly, with all empty print queues, there was one file in this folder that was in use by the print spooler service. Restarting the service did allow me to delete this file as well (perhaps this is a clue to the issue?). Even so, after emptying this folder and restarting the spooler, the print jobs still get stuck in the queue and time out.

Reset the Print Spooleron the client, and then try again.

This was also unsuccessful, the print jobs still get stuck in the queue after resetting the spooler.

I'll also mention that this is the first time this printer has been attempted to be installed on this server. It has never worked in the past on this machine.

Since my last post I have deployed another full virtual machine on another system running Windows Server 2022 on the same network as the system in question. This new test server and the machine in question are both deployed as RDP servers. The test Server 2022 instance works fine with the printer however. It was even installed using the same ISO as that of the machine in question. There must be some broken configuration right on the machine in question that is causing this behavior.

Thanks for the reply again, if you have more thoughts please let me know!