I have a rather tricky situation regarding printers and migration to a new print server. Here is the story.
Around 200 clients where migrated from an old 2003 R2 print server to a new Win2008 R2 print server. I was using a script that just changed the string on each client computer from\\OLDSERVERNAME to \\NEWSERVERNAME for each printer, keeping the new shared printer on the new print server with the same name. All old client printers where manually added (point & click) on each client. All clients are Win7.
That worked out in the end, but a new situation appeared:
- A specific printer on the new print server was installed with some excotic european language instead of English. It was a fax printer, used to send fax directly from a client computer in the way of a printer.
- The language problem was of course not acceptable, so the printer was deleted and re-created on the print server with correct language.
- However, the clients still have the old printer driver (fax driver) installed with wrong language.
So I was thinking of doing the following:
1. Script deleting of the old printer locally on each client (pretty easy, no problem).
2. Script deletion of the old print driver locally (much more difficult, no luck so far).
3. Deploy the new (and correct) printer with GPO/GPP.
Step 2 puzzled me a bit, since I was trying a lot of different things including:
1. Deleting the print driver with prndrvr.vbs -d in a shutdown script (no luck, it says that the driver is still in use).
2. Deleting the print driver manually via PrinterManagement.msc (the same GUI as on the print server), but it says that the print driver is still in use.
3. Deleting all registry keys manually related to the old print driver (finally lucky, but not a solution for +200 clients).
So do anyone have a suggestion for solving the print driver problem and delete the old print driver?
I could of course create some registry hacks and deploy it with GPO, but there are so many traces of the print driver in the registry so I would like to avoid it if possible.
Thanks for all help :)