Hello everyone,
An issue popped up exactly one week ago today concerning one of our client's terminal servers and has persisted since. I've looked through the past questions here and have seen what appears to be this issue a few times, but none of the questions that I saw ever presented a full resolution. The issue appears to be that any time a client disconnects from an RDP session (generally by using the X to close the window - NOT signing out), when they reconnect to that session the redirected local printers do not work. They show no status error, give no errors upon attempting to print, and nothing hangs in the printer queue. This is for every user that uses the terminal server from multiple locations in multiple offices, and includes the PDF printers, etc. This issue is temporarily resolved by having the user sign out of the RDP session fully (vs disconnecting), which terminates the session. The printers then work again the next time they connect, but will break again as soon as they disconnect/reconnect (not signing out.) It appears to me that this is an issue with something in the previous RDP connection hanging onto something and not allowing the printers to be resolved properly upon establishing a new connection (to the same session), but I'm not sure what it may be.
There are two potential workarounds for this - the first, which I chose to do, is simply to have everyone start signing out manually instead of disconnecting by closing the RDP session window, and telling them that if they accidentally disconnect, just to
reconnect and then sign out/in. The second potential workaround is to enable the GPO that terminates disconnected sessions after a certain period of time (which works as long as the user doesn't reconnect before that period of time elapses.) I
chose the former because clients at this location often work from home, and if they disconnected due to loss of internet and don't reconnect within that window, they will lose all of their work if the GPO is implemented.
I checked Print Management and it appears to be releasing the ports correctly upon disconnection and mapping them upon reconnection. I have, of course, restarted the spooler and cleared the System32 spool cache and restarted the server after hours.
The most recent updates on the server at the time the problem started occurred about 10 days before the problem began, and I tried removing all from the previous month to no effect (and I checked for any new updates first.) The client PCs are primarily
running W10 V2004, but I rolled back a client to test and it had no positive effect. This occurs with devices that connect both inside and outside of their network and domain. I tried disabling EasyPrint and installing the printers manually, making
the connection map only the default printer from each PC, changing the registry in the server so that it doesn't auto-check for printer drivers upon reconnection, and adjusted a few other similar RDP GPOs to no effect.