Print Spooler Errors: Restart, Clear, Fix

Print jobs stuck at the top of the queue, refusing to cancel, or an error saying the print spooler service is not running. This post explains what the spooler actually does, how to restart it and clear it out properly, and what it means when it keeps failing.

What a print spooler error actually is

The spooler is a Windows service that sits between your applications and the printer. When you print, the application hands the job to the spooler and moves on; the spooler stores the job on disk and feeds it to the printer at the printer's pace. That is why you can close a document while it is still printing.

The design has one weakness: it is a queue, and a queue is only as healthy as the job at its head. One corrupt or half-written job — from an application crash, a network drop mid-transfer, or a power cut at the wrong second — can wedge the entire queue. Every job behind it waits forever, the stuck job refuses to cancel (deleting it requires the cooperation of the very service that is wedged), and eventually someone reboots and hopes.

The good news is that nearly all spooler trouble is one of three things: a stuck queue, a stopped service, or a driver that crashes the service. All three have clean fixes.

Fix 1: restart the Print Spooler service

The quick version, worth trying first because it resolves the majority of cases:

1. Press Windows+R, type services.msc, press Enter.
2. Scroll to Print Spooler.
3. Right-click it and choose Restart (or Start, if the status column is blank).

Give it a few seconds, then check the queue. If the stuck job clears and printing resumes, you are done. While you are in the window, check that the service's startup type says Automatic — if someone or something set it to Disabled, that alone produces the "spooler is not running" error every time the PC boots.

Fix 2: clear the spool folder

If a job survives the restart — still sitting there, still "deleting" — the job file itself is damaged and needs removing from disk. The spooler keeps queued jobs in a folder, and emptying it with the service stopped removes them cleanly:

1. In services.msc, right-click Print Spooler and choose Stop.
2. Open File Explorer and go to C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS.
3. Delete every file inside the folder. Do not delete the folder itself.
4. Back in services, Start the Print Spooler again.

Everything that was queued is gone, so reprint what you actually needed. Warn colleagues first on a shared machine — their queued jobs go too.

For the keyboard-inclined, the same operation from an administrator Command Prompt:

net stop spooler
del /Q /F %systemroot%\System32\spool\PRINTERS\*.*
net start spooler

Either route is fine; they do the same thing.

Fix 3: when the spooler keeps crashing

A spooler that dies repeatedly — restarts fine, then stops again minutes or hours later — is a different animal. The service itself is rarely at fault; what crashes it is nearly always a printer driver, because drivers load into the spooler's process and a badly written one takes the service down with it.

The approach:

• Identify the trigger. Does it die when one particular printer is used, or one particular PC prints? That driver is your suspect.
• Update or cleanly reinstall the suspect driver from the manufacturer's site — remove the printer, remove the driver package in Print Server Properties, restart, install fresh.
• Remove drivers for printers that no longer exist. Machines accumulate them for years, and an ancient driver for a long-scrapped printer is a classic silent crasher.
• Check Event Viewer (Windows Logs → Application) around the time of a crash; the faulting module name frequently points straight at the driver file responsible.
• Install pending Windows updates. Spooler components have received a long series of security fixes since 2021, and mixed patch levels between machines cause their own failures.

Keeping the spooler out of trouble

A few habits prevent most recurrences. Do not queue enormous jobs to a printer that is switched off — the job sits in the spool folder waiting, and these are the jobs most likely to wedge. Where power cuts are routine, a UPS on the PC (not just the printer) means jobs stop getting truncated mid-spool. And on a shared office machine, resist the folk remedy of mashing Print five more times when nothing comes out; it stacks five more jobs behind the blockage. If the machine driving a shared printer suffers this weekly, note that the fix belongs on that host PC — restarting the spooler on your own machine clears only your own queue.

If jobs leave the queue successfully but the printer produces nothing or prints nonsense, the spooler is not your problem — that is a driver or connection fault, and for network machines our network printer guide is the better starting point.

When to hand it to a technician

If the spooler still crashes after clean driver reinstalls and updates, the remaining causes — corrupted Windows print components, a conflict buried in years of accumulated drivers — take specialist time to unpick. Toner Vision handles printer repair in Delhi and the surrounding NCR with a 4-hour average response, and offices that keep meeting this class of problem across many PCs and printers can put the whole fleet under a printer AMC and stop being their own IT department.