12

While running multiple Windows Server 2008 R2 RDSH farms we are experiencing an issue where the RDSH servers all are having their Registry bloated to the maximum value 2048MB. Using Sysinternals Registry Usage (ru.exe) we were able to determine over 1000MB of the registry being used up by Samsung Universal Printer related keys.

  • Samsung Universal Print Driver: Version 2.3.90
  • Samsung Universal Print Driver 2: Version 2.50.2.0

Registry Sections where the bloat is occurring:

HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\SSPrint\
  spe__\
  spd__\
  ssp6m\
HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-8\Software\SSPrint\
  spe__\
  spd__\
  ssp6m\

Each of those subkeys has over 500+ keys where Registry Usage is reporting they are taking up 30-40MB each.

Example subkey: HKU\.default\software\ssprint\spe__\{BCC489E0-E2CA-442B-A5A5-9B849579BE1F}

Looking into the data of the keys "Capabilities", "MUIData", etc. You can definitely tell they are Samsung Universal as the values reference Samsung Universal when you view them.

Taking one of the servers out of the mix I tried cleaning up these keys and was able to. Cleaning the ".Default" section also cleaned the "S-1-5-18" keys, so I'm thinking these are a reference link within the Registry. When I did it I cleared the HKU\.default\Printers\DevModes2 as well since this section would not even open in Regedit. In order to remove I had to CLI the to remove the "DevModes2" key and then recreate the key in Regedit.

As soon as I login with an account that has a printer deployed to them with the Samsung Universal Print Driver these keys start appearing and bloat out the registry. Because the registry is so filled up we have been experiencing User Profile issues causing Temporary Profiles to load. When we disabled the ability to have a Temporary Profile the users then may run into a "The User Profile Service service failed the logon. User Profile cannot be loaded." message.

Has anybody out there experienced this issue?

Is there some setting in the Samsung Universal Print Driver to prevent this behavior or to have it clean up after itself?

user353gre3
  • 103
Arachnid
  • 193

2 Answers2

1

HP has this exact same problem. The issue is that the driver is not very smart when it comes to multiple users connected to the same printer mapping at the same time and it keeps trying to reinstall itself for each user. We never figured out exactly how to fix this, but we came up with two workarounds:

Solution A (easy fix but is a total hack)
Set the Windows Installer service to disabled. Stops the problem dead in its tracks. The downside is obvious though. As soon as you need to do an install or run updates, you must turn the service back on and the registry will immediately begin swelling again.

Solution B (ugly fix but is stable and supported)
Enforce the Remote Desktop EasyPrint driver via Group Policy. This makes print jobs render on the clients instead of the server. The downside here is that you will then need to manually remove every user's printer connection from every printer on every server in the farm, and then delete the drivers. I hope you're good with scripting!

Wes Sayeed
  • 1,942
1

I had the exact same issue and can confirm it is fixed in the new version of Samsung Universal Print Driver 2 (2.50.5) . I was also running 2.50.2 and the key in question was using 275MB. Simply uninstalling the old version and installing the new version on the server (I did not update any client drivers) reduced the size of the key to 3MB. I also tried logging on and back off and can confirm it now deletes the keys when you log off, unlike before.

If you're curious, before it would not delete the keys. In a single user environment this isn't a problem but since the printers are named for the user and the session, it is an exponential problem (for a 20 user server like mine you generate up to 400 keys... and that's if you only have 1 printer per client)

edit: the new key is called usp01 instead of spe__

Jared Epp
  • 26
  • 1