Windows 11 - where did my printers go? not in system settings anymore

Question

I think maybe an update caused this but I really have no idea. I work in a print shop at a college and have at least five printers I use (not to mention the "print to pdf" and other Microsoft stuff, so the list of installed devices is long. Now when I go to the system settings there is only one printer showing up. I can still print to all of my printers - they just don't show up in the system settings. Anyone have any ideas what happened? I don't know if adding them all again will cause any printing problems because clearly if I can still print to them then they must be added, right? Any help?

Answer 1

I saw a reference to this problem involving a recent update, but am having trouble finding the source at the moment. It involves the Settings app only. You can see your printers using the older Devices and Printers window with the following command while waiting for an MS fix.

%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c "start shell:::{26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064C98683}\0::{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}"

OR

start shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}

Answer 2

A couple of other people have reported this same problem, so most likely, this is caused by a Windows update.

If you are able to print to our printers without any problem, it may be best to do nothing and wait for the April update to be released and that may resolve the problem with the printers not showing in the Settings app.

Otherwise, if you are experiencing problems printing to your printers, the best option would be to go to the support page for your printer on the manufacturers website to download and re-install (not update the version of printer drivers and software they provide.