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<p>One of my print server started to behave weird. When I&#8217;ve tried to open Printers and Faxes on my Print Server that uses Windows 2003 Server, I was unable to make any changes to installed printers, since the printers and faxes page is constantly refreshing.</p>
<p>During this refresh, print spooler was normally working, it was not restarting.</p>
<p>I have tried to restart the print spooler and the print server, but without luck. I am also not sure when this started happening, although I thought it could be related to a faulty print driver installed by someone from my colleagues. <!--more--></p>
<p>Then I&#8217;ve noticed that CPU has been at 100%. Two processes that were holding the high CPU usage at 100% were<strong> spoolsv.exe</strong> and <strong>explorer.exe</strong><b>.</b></p>
<p><span style="color: #008000;">Solution:</span></p>
<p>The cause of this issue is a corrupted print file stuck in your spool folder. To fix this do the following:</p>
<p>Hit Run and type &#8216;<strong>services.ms</strong>c&#8217;</p>
<p>In the right pane navigate to &#8216;<strong>Print Spooler</strong>&#8216;. Right click on the spooler and stop it.</p>
<p>Open <span style="color: #003366;">C:\Windows\system32\spool\PRINTERS </span>that contains spool files with the <strong>.shd</strong> and <strong>.shl</strong> extensions. You may delete the contents of this folder.</p>
<p><span style="color: #ff0000;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">NOTE</span>:</span> Above path is the default Print Spooler path, if you have moved the spool folder to another location, please use that path instead.</p>
<p>Start the &#8216;Print Spooler&#8217; again and see and issue should be resolved.</p>