seems like there is a quite bad problem with HP Universal Print Driver 4.7 (and older) when used on a Citrix Server. According to some forum threads, the issues were resolved in version 4.7.2, however, this version is not available for public download, one needs to contact HP support to get it.
as I did this, and I want to help other admins, here is a link: Download HP Universal Print Driver 4.7.2 (PCL5, PCL6 and PS)
Note: I did not test the driver yet, but it was obtained from HP directly
Update: just changing the driver on the printserver did not help so far….
Update 2: seems like we could fix the problem by using the newly released specific driver for the hp color laserjet 5550 instead of the universal print driver
I have been working with HP UPD ver 4.5 4.7 and now 5.0 but they all seem to lack a good response time working within citrix and mapping printers via policies. the problem is speed. when your policies have more then one printer using the same HP UPD driver it seems to hang the system taking a long time to finsih mapping the printers. but if you use the Native driver it maps with good speed. Citrix does have a tool that you can use to mesuae this called printer stress tool. I am not sure if at time of mapping is it going out to each printer via snmp to get its settings or should it be getting that info from the print server only.
But using the HP UPD keeps causing unstable conditions on the farm where it will crash (randomly) the Citrix Print service and / or the Windows Print Spooler
it seems that even when we removed the printers using the printserver dialogue in windows, there are some parts of the upd still around. maybe we will need to remove all printers, then completely empty the c:\windows\…\spooler folder….
I’m having the same problem and have not been able to find a resolution as of yet. HP is absolutely no help at all. I found this link and it does seem to resolve the time it takes to deploy printers, but also seems to break printing completely. I’m at a loss as to why there is next to zero information on this when i google it, and why HP is taking so long to fix it.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=412144&prodTypeId=18972&objectID=c01682861
nice link, we also tried the 0-byte-msi trick, but this didn’t help too much…