Print jobs sticking with "Access Denied" error

Windows 7 and 10 clients on domain network, printing to various print shares on Windows servers…users are having jobs get stuck in their print queue with “Access Denied” listed as the status. These are all users who have been printing to these print shares for months or even years without issue. They’ll then build up multiple print jobs behind the stuck job before realizing there’s a problem. As soon as they cancel the “Denied” job, all the other jobs print.

Anyone seen an issue like this? Perhaps there’s some recent WSUS update that has caused this? Haven’t been able to find anything so far.

I’m not sure that it’s a client issue as much as a server issue. We are mostly mac but print to a windows print server and have that same issue sometimes. Do you use PaperCut by chance? We do and I’m not sure if it’s that or what. I have noticed if the clocks on the client and server are skewed I will get that as well.

Weird. Now that I dig further, all the print shares that have had this intermittent problem are on a 2012 server. At least three different shares have given the problem, each for different users. These are shares that work most days but gave one or two users problems. Once the “access denied” job was deleted, any other jobs the user had pending would print. AND, while that user was jammed up, other users could still print. Good thought on the clocks…I checked those and they’re all well synced.

Hugh,
When your users receive the “Access Denied” error, is it from a particular application?
Word, Excel, PDF?

A variety…excel, adobe reader and chrome.

Are users Standard users or admins?
I saw a link about a GPO setting for ‘Point & Print’.
Not sure if it relates, but here it is:

Users are standard but it’s not a driver install issue. These are printers they’ve used for months without issue. One print job gets stuck with “access denied” that holds up that user’s print jobs (but not other users’ jobs) until the denied job gets deleted…then the jobs stuck behind it print fine. And future jobs print fine…until a few days later when it may happen again or not. Of the four users who have experienced this, only one has experienced it multiple times.

That is a strange one!

Did you ever find a solution for this? I’ve been chasing down an issue that appears to be the same. I had thought it was a Kerberos issue (clocks out of sync) but it’s still present.

Didn’t find a solution, except making sure the user knew how to find/delete the stuck job. It hasn’t been reported again, so either it stopped happening or they learned how to fix it.