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New Windows Update Breaks Network Printing

ByComputer World

Yet again another Windows 10 update has cuased havoc worldwide with printing, this time its network printing that has been affected.

This came about on Tuesday this week when Microsoft released a security update to fix the PrintNightmare vulnerability. This was a vulnerability that allowed several ransomware threat actors to gain SYSTEM privileges on vulnerable devices, as shown in the video above. Since the release of this update, Windows system admins have been reporting that their computers can’t print to network printers anymore since installing the PrintNightmare updates on their print servers.

Windows admins had the following statements to make regarding the issue:

“The problem has happened for us on different sites. The print servers were 2012R2 and 2016. All worked fine before the update.”

“After yesterday’s Windows Update, none of the network computers can print to Windows 10 computer we use as a print server.”

“As far as i know, this affected both printers with v3 and v4 drivers, but I’m not 100% sure (this issue was different from the issue emerged with the previous update which broke v3 printers). After uninstalling the patch on the server everything got back to normal.”

So while all users are experiencing problems with printing, they don’t get the same errors. Users with USB printers that are connecting directly to their PC are not experiencing any issues.

The updates associated with the new PrintNightmare security update and the subsequent network printing problems are:

When fixing the PrintNightmare vulnerabilities, Microsoft had to make some changes tot he Windows Point and Print featyre and how drivers can be installed from a print server. These changes included requiring admind privileges to install a printer through the Point and Print feature. Upon doing so, Windows users started to encounter errors when trying to print, or Windows would ask for an admin password to update printer drivers.

Admins can configure this change via the Windows Registry CopyFilesPolicy value under the HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers key. When set to ‘1’, CopyFiles will be enabled again.

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