An interesting support case came across my desk last week.  One of our customers reported an issue involving network printers that were distributed via Microsoft Group Policy to over two hundred Windows XP workstations that were still appearing in the “Printers and faxes” dialogue box long after the policy was removed.

Manually removing the printers only temporarily resolved the problem, as the printers would reappear after a certain amount of time.  We double checked the workstations to verify that they were still not inheriting the policy, and none were. 

After fully investigating the issue, and drawing on Microsoft Support for guidance, we were able to find the source of the problem.  Once network printers have been distributed via group policy, great care has to be taken when it’s time to remove the printers from the active workstations.  Improper removal results in registry entries for the printers remaining in the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintConnections

To remove this entry manually, one must backup the registry, delete the item, and then restart the Print Spooler service.  Of course, manually removing this one registry entry on over two hundred desktops seemed very time consuming and impractical.  Luckily for this customer, we had just implemented a very handy solution from Scriptlogic called Desktop Authority. (<a href="http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/desktopauthority/">http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/desktopauthority/</a>)

Using Desktop Authority the customer was able to make this change on all of the affected workstations without ever having to leave his desk, or write a complex script.