Are you getting calls from users saying their printers are missing in citrix? It’s probably a problem with a or a few print drivers interacting with citrix.  First off you can’t blame citrix as I was initially doing. It’s really not a citrix problem (I’ll prove that below showing that the print server has no citrix software on it), it’s more related to the print driver and the ways it acts with terminal services. If your spooler keeps crashing, or you hear your users complaining saying all my printers are missing in citrix then it might be a print driver acting up crashing your spooler. Well the problem is how do you narrow down the printer driver causing the issue. We had this same problem across the board, with different users all the time until I talked to a citrix engineer. So I’ve described the steps from what I learned from him below, so you don’t need to waste a support call or your time. Hopefully this will help you out.

Problem: Printers are missing when user logs on to citrix.

1. Create a another print server for testing purposes. I used a virtual machine for testing. If you don’t want to do this skip to step 6 (but I highly recommend you do this as you’ll be crashing your spooler most likely on your live print server).

2. Go to the live print server and lets migrate all the printers and the drivers to test print server we created in the above step using the Microsoft Printer Migrator 3.1 tool, which you can download here.

3. Now you’ll need to install the tool on the live print server and the test print server.

4. Backup the printer and drivers on the live print server to a file (it’ll create a .cab), then restore the printers and drivers on the test print server using the .cab file you created when you backed it up.

5. Now that’s all you need to do with the live print server, lets focus on the test print server.

6. Download the stress print tool from citrix and read the article on their website explaining the instructions on how to use it http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX109374.

7. Run the stress tool, and also run a perfmon (performance monitor) on the spooler thread and how it interacts with the processor.

8. Now test one driver (check off the driver and highlight it). You really don’t need to change any of the default options, except for the add events use 5, and 5 times to repeat the test (according to what a citrix engineer told me).

9. Now run the test, watch how the driver interacts with the spooler and processor, and also check for any warning in the stress tool.

If it crashes the spooler that’s a bad driver

Now what the citrix engineer told me was that if you get 0 errors, and the spooler didn’t crash that’s a good driver. If you get 1or 2 warning errors from the stress tool it’s ok, anything more than that you need to look into getting another driver for that printer.

10. Now restart the print spooler test and repeat.

Hope that helps some of you, remember you need to check print driver with the tool before installing drivers, saves a lot of headache later.