Windows 7 support has ended

Get Windows 10 to continue receiving support.

Collin K

An unknown error occurred while printing - With every printer!

This seemingly started happening just today. Previously all printers were working since the machine was new. Today any program that tries to print to any of the printers which are setup gets an error. Firefox says "an unknown error occurred while printing" other programs say related things. Our financial software just says warning and then aborts the print job.

I can print a test page from the printer properties page of a printer.

I have enabled the operational log in the event viewer and nothing shows up in it when I try to print. Neither does anything show up in the admin log.

I have tried it both with my firewall (Comodo) running and with Comodo totally closed.

I suspect an update but I went into the screen where I can uninstall updates and nothing actually shows up recently. I also tried to revert windows to a previous restore point. There is one from two days ago. No dice. It says something stupid about how it couldn't open the restore registry or something... I'm really starting to not like Windows 7...

This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread.

Answer

Ramyar Jafarkhani

Looks like some people weren't noticing that this was happening in ALL programs with ALL printer. Printer drivers, etc alone would not be to blame in this case.

I was having the same issue on my laptop. I rarely shut it down (bad I know) and I usually close the screen and let it sleep. Actually rebooting the system fixed the problem for me. Not sure if your situation is similar and/or if you've restarted the computer or not since you started getting the errors.

Regards,

6 people were helped by this reply

Did this solve your problem?

Sorry this didn't help.

Great! Thanks for marking this as the answer.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site.

How satisfied are you with this response?

Thanks for your feedback.

Answer

Chris - Support Engineer

Hi Collin K.,

Thanks for your post.

Sorry for the delay, I was off of work.

Is this a networked printer?

The System Files Checker should have replaced the file if it was corrupt. SFC checks things like file size and modified date to see if files have changed.

The fact that you've tried to create the new user profile to no avail is another strange item.

You stated that "It says something stupid about how it couldn't open the restore registry or something..." when trying to restore to previous version.

That's out of the ordinary and may point to a larger problem.

I'm not dismissing the SPLWOW64.exe file, but if there if there is an issue in restoring information on your computer, SFC may have not worked properly, causing the issue to remain.

Did SFC mention any files it couldn't fix? Have you been able to restore to a previous version since the original incident?

What version of Windows do you have? 64bit version as well, I gather. Is this a preinstalled (OEM) version, say from Dell or Acer?

Are you using any backup software? I suggest performing a clean boot:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

After that, disable your anti-virus temporarily if possible.

I think that may be whats preventing the System Restore and possibley the SFC from fixing the SPLWOW64.exe file if it's corrupt.

If you can get the anti-virus disabled, I suggest rerunning the SFC and retrying the System Restore if that doesn't work.

I found this on another forum:

"Typically when there is a crash in splwow64 thunking process, it's the driver that's causing the crash (the splwow64 is a bare-bone GDI thunk dispatcher; there is very little room for the OS to fault here)."

Further in the post this is stated:

"I had the same problem, using a Xerox copier as the printer.

So I opend the properties for the printer with "Run as Administrator" a Java applet startet, and Vista came with a block/unblock warning. So I Unblocked this Java thing, and tried to print again, this time I had no problems."

Here's a link to that thread:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsxps/thread/771586c7-95f9-4977-9db0-c01a24a3134f

For Vista but pertains to Win7.

Chris
Microsoft Answers Support Engineer
Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.