Operating System: Windows 7, Vista (and possibly others)
It is actually quite alarming how many times my printer spool gets jammed up with a document that just doesn’t want to delete. For some unknown reason, my jobs seem to die half way through them. Maybe the printer gets rebooted, maybe there’s a jam…
Anyways, the symptom is a printer document that gets left in Deleting… mode. Huge pain. As many times as you try and right click -> cancel all documents it doesn’t work. 10, 20. Keep trying, it wont work.
I used to think that rebooting both the computer and the printer at the same time would fix this. But that doesn’t really work if you hold your breath wrong.
Solution
It’s actually quite a graceful solution.
- start -> search for programs and files -> type: services (or Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Services)
- scroll down for service called Print Spooler
- right click on this service and select Restart
This will delete any jobs that are in the queue.
I have also read that stopping the processes that are associated with the printer in the task manager, when used in conjunction with this process, worked for some people. I would advise restarting the print spooler (as shown above) a few times before you try this, and restarting it once again after you remove the tasks from the task manager.
Hope this helps!