Network printers fail only when machine is set as a member of our domain

Question

Summary of issue:

We have network printers that our machines frequently use. Our machines used to be set to a workgroup, and the network printers worked fine. We now have a domain that we want to put all of our machines on, but switching a machine from using workgroups to using a domain causes network printers to fail, freezing any application that views/tries to print with them. Setting them back to using a workgroup fixes printing, but we can't do that since we want to use the domain.

Full details:

Our department has recently started using domains instead of workgroups for all of our machines (which are on Windows 10 Enterprise N with the latest updates installed). We have a few Konica Bizhub network printers.

We have a room where all the machines connect to network printers when they start up. They do this by running a .vbs script at boot that basically just does net.addWindowsprinterconnection "\\[IP address]\Printer-A", net.addWindowsprinterconnection "\\[IP address]\Printer-B", et cetera. When the machine this runs on is set to a workgroup, this works fine: The printers appear in the Devices and Printers menu, and print jobs can be seamlessly sent.

As soon as a machine is set to use our domain instead of a workgroup, something breaks. Printers still appear in the Devices and Printers menu, but if you go to any application like for example Microsoft Word and try to print, the application will immediately freeze as soon as the network printer is selected. It's not necessary to even start a print job; the application crashes simply by selecting a network printer. Applications I've tested that freeze indefinitely when this occurs are any Windows prompt to print a test page, all Office applications, Notepad, and any browser. This same issue occurs if the network printer is added via the control panel rather than the .vbs script, so I do not believe the script is the cause. This issue is immediately resolved if I set the machine back to a workgroup, but for our purposes this is not an option.

I greatly suspect that this is some sort of driver related issue. Perhaps being connected to a domain causes the machine to refuse to use the driver provided by the network printer correctly. The closest I have come to fixing this issue was manually replacing a driver .dll in C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\3, as it allowed me to select the network printer without a freeze in Microsoft Word (the freeze now happens when you actually attempt to print off of it).

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hello

Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having issues related to network Printers.

First Disable any Antivirus program or Windows firewall you may have for temporary purpose.

In your case I will suggest you to Introduce Windows Print Services and Install and configure all your Network Printer on Print Services then Deploy them via GPO , using Printer GPO you will not required to run any script to MAP printers.

Reference :

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/printing/use-group-policy-to-control-ad-printer

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