Random users print wingdings after installing new printer on print server

[Mmartens12]

We have a business environment with 75 shared printers running off of a Win 2008 R2. Our printers range from new HP M604 to older HP 4050s. We are currently using Universal Print Driver (6.0) on majority of our printers, and recently staring using 6.2.

When we create a new printer on the server, random users start printing Wingdings until we remove and add the printer/drivers back on the user’s pc.  We haven’t been able to correlate a connection between when the new printer is added and the user effected.

Today we figured out that if we change the driver on the printer on the server, the user can print without touching their pc.

Does this make sense?  Have you seen anything like this before?

[tonerspills]

I have seen ASCII characters print because of a wrong driver being selected. Usually the network printer will start printing out blank pages or pages with 1 line of wingdings across the top. There may be a duplicate IP out there somewhere- or a printer driver that got accidently renamed.

example. PCL6 driver for a P3015 was accidently rename Bob'sM603.

Also be sure to double check ports if your using TCP/IP ranges or renaming TCP/IP ports (example yourprinter.local) same issue except a recent update to windows has replaced instaled TCP/IP ports with WSD ports

[tonerspills]

They ran me out of the office before I could finish my reply! As I was saying- most of the times I've seen this, it eventually boiled down to some type of driver incompatability.

Is this happening to just a specific model of printer, one specific printer, or just randomly across a variety of machines?

If it is happening to just one specific printer, you may try pushing new firmware to that printer. If that does not work, you could try hooking the printer up locally via usb, intalling the driver to that specific client pc and try printing from your applications on that machine. If you still get garbage from a local usb install,  that almost certainly rules out your network and points to a driver and software mismatch. Might have to run a pcl5 or pcl6  driver for a specific program to work right with a specific model.