We have 100 people at my company, and randomly, one month ago, a user who has been working without issues for a year straight, has her RDP session to a terminal server crashes every time she tries to print. This has now started happening to a second user in a different office. Both users are on Windows 7 Pro laptops that are fully patched and joined to the domain. The first users always connects to the VPN to access the network, the second user is at an office that is always on the netork. In both cases the users have been working normally for months until this happens.
With user 1 I have tried and failed when I
sent her three different laptops (so she tried 3 laptops total)
on laptops 2 and 3 user1 logged in using a different username. So user1's name is jessica, the new username was jessica2. Jessica2 was a clone of the Jessica AD account.
Tried two different computers
deleted her profile on the terminal server
had her sign into our alternate terminal server(cloned a year ago from the first terminal server she tried; cloned for load balancing purposes, after a year it has slightly forked)
with user1 logged in locally and me(domain admin) logged into the terminal server(via RDP) also fails
So if user1 or 2 try to print to a physical printer) their session is disconnected, if they sign in again they are brought back to the screen that they had before clicking print(our group policy isn't set to automatically log out disconnected users, if that matters).
If the user tries to print to a PDF printer/microsoft XPS printer, that works and there isn't a crash
As a work around I gave user1 a 4th laptop that isn't joined to the domain and created a jessica3 account. So she logs in locally using a local admin account, then VPNs in using jessica3, and RDPs into the terminal server using Jessica3, and she can then print. But without being on the domain she isn't very efficient because of numerous password prompts and file access problems, due to being on a non domain computer
I know this is an enormous post, but I have since gone through 25 scenarios with these two people, 5 computers, 4 user accounts, 2 terminal servers, and 4 printers. I put all of this in a spreadsheet to keep track of it, and I can't isolate a variable that is causing it. So far only 2 out of 100 users are affected, but I can't figure out why. I also want to point out 8 months ago a new employee started and to set up her AD account I cloned jessica's account and gave her a laptop of the same model as Jessica. They do the same job, but she is working fine. I can't figure out why
When remote desktop crashes, the only thing in the event viewer of the laptop is mstsc.exe app crash, and the terminal server only has logs of the printers going away due to the user being disconnected.
I have also cloned one of the terminal servers, installed 150 windows updates, and retested. The same problems persist