Can’t Cancel Print Job in Windows Vista?

The other day I ran into an odd problem–one which actually seems not uncommon in Windows Vista, to judge from some Googling I did.

For some reason, a print job I was trying wouldn’t print. Not only would it not print, but when I opened the print queue that job was still in there, and would refuse to be canceled or delete. When I would try to print anything else, it would not print until the hung print job would complete.

It took a while to figure out what to do about this. I discovered that if I restarted the “Print Spooler” service I might be able to print one document, but then I would have to do this every time I wanted to print.

The real solution is to run some administrative commands from the command line, as detailed here: http://www.technipages.com/windows-7vista-clear-print-queue.html

The instructions from that page are listed here below. This seems to be a foolproof way to get rid of those hung print jobs that refused to be canceled.

1. Click Start.

2. Type Command.

3. Right-click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

4. Type net stop spooler then press Enter.

5. Type del %systemroot%\System32\spool\printers\* /Q then press Enter.

6.  Type net start spooler then press Enter.