We have a large mixture of HP and Ricoh printers in our environment. They are all linked through a Server 2007 Enterprise edition Server. For the HP printers, some of them do use the specific print driver and other user a universal print driver, also a mix between PCL 5 and 6. Most of the problem are occurring on Windows 7 (we don't have many windows XP and they use a different print server)and we are just starting to see some of these problems on Windows 8 (just starting to deploy). Here are the problem we are having:
1. Randomly the HP printer will stop working. Everything appears to be correct on the server and the PC and it works fine from another PC, but it doesn't appear to be communicating to the printer at all. You click Print in any application and it never actually does anything. If you just delete and re-add the printer you get problem #2. To actually fix it, you have to remove the printer, go into Print Management and delete all HP drivers (on one of the Windows 8 device just removing the one associated with the printer didn't work but removing them all fixed the issue) and telling it to redownload the print driver from the server.
2. The HP printer will randomly or on first install start printing "strange characters" and will keep printing until the job is canceled. Again we found that removing the printer and completely removing the drivers from Print Management and reinstalling the print will fix this.
3. We only started seeing this issue on upgrading the Ricoh printers themselves with new models. The print spoolers keep failing and the service will not start. The fix we found was to remove the c:\windows\System32\spool\drivers\ folder. Once you start the service, everything starts working again.
The biggest issue is with the HP printers (1 and 2). These keep reoccurring with the same users and we are starting to get bombarded with calls on our helpdesk. Let me know if there is something I can check to try to prevent these drivers from becoming corrupt on the PCs.
Thank you!