Default printers disppearing leaving ONLY Adobe PDF Printer

[pembLib]

We are a public library and installed Acrobat Pro 2017 on public Windows 7 computers a few months ago. We have a random but recurring issue where the regular default printers vanish and ONLY Adobe PDF remains. If we reboot, the printers usually return. This seems to have some connection to Adobe updates, possibly. Is there a setting we can change to stop this?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

There is nothing that Adobe Acrobat or its installers do to add, modify, or delete any printer driver instances other than the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance. There is no “setting” for this because we simply don't do that.

The fact that the printer driver instances reappear after rebooting is indicative of some other Windows system configuration problem having nothing directly to do with Acrobat. That having been said, I suspect that the problem has to do with the Windows Print Spooler service failing and not restarting. Rebooting would “solve” that symptom. What may be happening is that when Acrobat updates, it does temporarily stop the Windows Print Spooler service, makes changes to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver instance, and then restarts the Windows Print Spooler service. Perhaps, it is the restart of this service which is failing for some reason possibly associated with the user running with very low system privileges. My recommendation is to always follow an Acrobat update with a system reboot and let us know if that resolves the problem.

          - Dov

[pembLib]

Thank you. We will look into the Spooler issue.