Anilrgowda

Everytime I try to Add a network printer in Windows Vista Ultimate explorer crashes and restarts. Therefore I can't add a network printer.

Here is my setup...

Client PC is Windows Vista Ultimate fully patched and updated etc.....
Server is Windows 2003 Active Directory Domain Controller
Printer is HP Color Laserjet 3600
Network is a standard 100 Mbit Ethernet.

I have XP machines that can add this printer just fine so it is not a problem with the network. I can ping the device from Vista just fine. I just cannot add a network printer. By the way I also installed vista drivers on the print server for the printer in addition to xp drivers for my other clients. This seems to be a bug in Vista but I can't find any documentation on it.

Anilrgowda

See if this is of any help:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.vista.print_fax_scan/browse_thread/thread/5533f3481e85f7ba/a65057785b908891%23a65057785b908891

I've seen other people have this problem, but didn't find a way to resolve
this.

I'm running Vista Ult on a SBS03 domain. When I click add network printer I
get a dialog box saying windows explorer has quit and is restarting which it
does, then the printer control panel is gone and nuttin'. No dialog box to
send a crash report or anything.

Thanks.
Hugh



A possible answer from Dan [MSFT]:

Alright, we're going to try a different solution here. There's a known
issue in the Active Directory search that is likely the problem you're
hitting (thanks everyone who sends in crash information).

I'm going to instruct you on how to use policies to turn off the AD search
so that the affected code doesn't run on your machine. We're currently
evaluating a fix for this for SP1 (sorry, can't promise anything) so with a
little luck folks won't continue hitting this for long.

Here's what do do on the machine that is running the Add Printer wizard.
1) Open a command prompt (Start \ All Programs \ Accessories \ Command
Prompt)
2) Start gpedit (type in gpedit & hit enter). This may require an elevation
(the UAC dialog). Accept this.
3) Navigate to Local Computer Policy \ Computer Configuration \
Administrative Templates \ Printers
4) Find the entry named "Add Printer wizard - Network scan page (Managed
network)" & double click it to open.
5) Select Enabled
6) In the entry for "Number of directory printers" set this to 0.
7) Click OK & close gpedit
8) From the command line run "gpupdate". This can take several minutes to
run.
9) The Add Printer wizard will not run the AD search on the net search page,
which should prevent the crash.

If you want to select a printer that was published to the active directory
you can use one of two methods:
1) The old active directory search should still work.
a) On the network search page, click "The printer I want isn't listed"
b) Select "Find a printer in the directory, based on location or
feature" on the next page. This search should continue to work.
2) You can always enter these printers directly by their names.
a) On the network search page, click "The printer I want isn't listed"
b) Select "Select a shared printer by name" and type in the name, for
example "\\computername\printername"

Let me know if this solves your problem. And keep sending crash logs, they
are very useful.