Windows Server 2008 R2 and network printer drivers - Windows cannot connect to the printer.

Hi.

How are you?

Unfortunately, I was dealing with this issue for a while, looking for info on the Internet and I didn't find anything. So I decided to use some internal resources in order to solve it.

 I was facing the error Windows cannot connect to the printer, Operation failed with error 0x00000057 when adding a new printer with admin privileges.

The curious thing was that the printer was working before however ,after a global outage on the printer server, it gave up working and disappeared from printer devices.

Basically, all pointed that the root cause was a bad driver or bad connection. Then I decided to go deeper and to open a regedit.exe window. I was checking the windows register and I found that there were existent printer connections on the regkey HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Connections\[NAME OF THE NETWORK PRINTER]. I deleted them, tried to add again the printer and all worked like a charm.

Thanks.

Kind Regards.

Héctor Calvarro Martín. SharePoint Dev. Microsoft Support Engineer for DEV EMEA