Remote Desktop Print Jobs Vanish

When printing from a Remote Desktop session, the system goes through the motions of printing but nothing comes out of the printer. Furthermore, the Remote Desktop session correctly maps the client's printer. Updating the printer drivers on client and server does not help, nor does changing the printing model (eg using a PCL driver instead of a PostScript driver).

This has been observed on down-level clients such as Windows XP (which have relatively old Remote Desktop clients) on newer Remote Desktop Services servers (such as Windows 2008 R2).

This may occur if the Remote Desktop Services server is configured to allow the Easy Print driver. To disable:

1. Open the Local Group Policy Editor.

2. Navigate to: Local Computer Policy → Computer Configuration → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Remote Desktop Services → Remote Desktop Session Host → Printer Redirection.

3. Set Use Remote Desktop Easy Print printer driver first to Disabled.