Terminal Services Easy Print “Access is Denied” Event ID 6161
Well, well, well. After about 2.5 hours of hardcore troubleshooting, Googling, and Microsoft Forum browsing, I was finally able to get Terminal Services Easy Print to print to my Dell printer. Here’s my scenario:
TS: Windows Server 2008 Standard, x64 with . NET Framework 3.0 SP1 installed (pre-reqs for Easy Print).
Client: Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 with .NET Framework 3.5 and TS Client 6.1 installed (also pre-reqs for Easy Print).
Connecting to the Terminal Server showed the redirected printers just fine. I was even able to get into the Printer Preferences and have it show settings. This part gave me an error message of “Printer settings could not be saved. This operation is not supported”, however. Even after doing the fix, it still does it so I’m stuck on having defaults when printing stuff out (NOT GOOD when it comes to QuickBooks check printing). Hopefully I can fix that issue.
Print test pages seemed to work as far as clicking on “Print Test Page” and having it say “A test page has been sent to the printer…” However, nothing came out of my local printer. Further investigation revealed the following Event Log error ID 6161:
“The document Test Page, owned by Administrator, failed to print on printer Dell 3110cn (redirected 2). Try to print the document again, or restart the print spooler.
Data type: RAW. Size of the spool file in bytes: 133576. Number of bytes printed: 0. Total number of pages in the document: 1. Number of pages printed: 0. Client computer: \\SOMA. Win32 error code returned by the print processor: 5. Access is denied.”
As you can see, it says “Access is denied”. I drilled into this issue further and discovered that by going to the Security tab of the redirected printer in question revealed that the user did not even have any permission whatsoever to print to the print. All the boxes were grayed out and unchecked. So I figured out that it was definitely some kind of permissions issue. Either the TS server was blocking access or my local Vista machine was. Googling upon this turned up an ExpertsExchange discussion on this same issue. The fix?
Give write/modify permissions to the Domain Users group on c:\windows\system32\spool folder on the TS server.
This got it working and things print out no problem now. Now all I have to do is figure out why I can’t edit the printer preferences. “Easy Print”? Yeah right.
Tags: event id 6161, terminal services easy print, ts easy print