An unknown error occurred while printing - With every printer!

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,

RJ

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.