unable to print PDF's from the terminal server

Report · Mar 10, 2016

Hi Guys,

We have a terminal server that is only being used by two users for the next couple weeks however both of them are having issues usually not at the same time but has happened where they are not being able to print PDF's but are able to print word docs etc.

When this happens the green tick on the default printer has also disappeared but when right clicking on that printer we are able to tell it is set to the default.

We have tried updating the drivers, uninstalling Adobe Reader and reinstalling, restarting print spooler and a few other things but the only resolution is actually restarting the server which cannot be done every time and I need to resolve this before everyone migrates from the old server.

I am not sure how to proceed and would love some help, is this a Server issue or Adobe Reader issue?

Report · Sep 19, 2018

I was seeing the same issue on 2016 RDS when i would turn off Protected Mode at Startup. When i did it individually per user i had to restart the print spooler every time and it instantly started printing. I know it is not ideal but i turned off protected mode through GPO by creating the following Registry Key.

Did a gpupdate /force and then restarted print spooler, havent had a single problem since. very annoying issue.

Report · Jul 26, 2018

EDIT: It appears I missed the link earlier in this thread that goes to a thread with a user named Aardum ( or so? ) who may have figured out the issue. He wrote up an article on what he did, but that link no longer works. However, I found it here:

Fix numerous print issues with RDS 2012 by cleaning up your print environment | Digital Zombies

I have not had a chance to read it yet but will tomorrow. I hope it helps us all.

(original erroneous post):

We have been fighting this for as long as I can remember on our 2012r2 RDS Farm. The printers are installed on a 2012r2 print server and assigned to users based on group membership via a GPO on log in. The behavior we see is everything is fine until suddenly they can not print an Adobe PDF. We see that the default printer is usually unchecked even though it is still the default, and when an attempt to print is done, there is no progress bar.

We found that if we remove the default printer and run gpupdate that it will put the printer back and we see the check mark. The user can then print.

How many jokes are there now that start with 'how many Adobe Software Engineers does it take to...? I mean it has been YEARS.

Report · Sep 30, 2019

This solution worked for me. I was having an issue from Win 2010 laptops accessing applications via Win 2016 RDS Service via RemoteApp