We have a domain network with about 30 computers and an active directory on Windows Server SBS 2003 32bit. I’ve recently installed Microsoft Office OneNote and the problem started with and seems to be associated with it. Whenever I connect to this server from my Windows 7 Pro 32bit client where OneNote is installed, even if OneNote is closed, it automatically opens and asks me where I want to place a certain printout. A box from OneNote shows with a hierarchy tree of all my notebooks expecting me to tell it which page to place some printout. If I do choose a page, it fails and says it was unable to insert this printout. Otherwise, I usually just ignore this every time – but it is getting annoying because I do RDP very often. We have many computers and a number of servers and this scenario never happens elsewhere. Just when I connect RDP from this one Win7 PC to this one Server2003 PC.
What could be going on here?
Looks like I was pretty close with my comment up there: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officeitpro/thread/fdb951e5-82a4-46a0-8a74-5677b18094d6 shows others with the same issue.
If you don’t need to tunnel printing through the Remote Desktop connection, you can untick the Printers checkbox in the Local Resources tab of mstsc.exe’s options.
If you do need Remote Desktop printer redirection, you’re likely out of luck until MS fix the OneNote driver, but http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911913 suggests a registry setting that might prevent this, if the “Send To OneNote” ‘printer’ is not set as your default printer (it should work out of the box in Win2008+ but the KB article suggests a hotfix is needed for Win2003 in order to honour this registry setting — make sure you perform due diligence before you install it):
- Open regedit.exe
- Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR - Create a new DWORD value (or edit the existing one) called
RedirectDefaultPrinterOnly - Set its value to
1 - Set any other printer in your printers list to be the default
Of course, if you need to print from the server and your network is small/manageable enough, you can probably just connect to the printers you need, directly on the server, and disable Printer Redirection for that server altogether:
- On the server, open regedit.exe
- Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\Wds\rdpwd - Create a new DWORD value (or edit the existing one) called
fEnablePrintRDR - Set its value to
0
If the registry-editing-on-the-server-stuff seems a bit too dangerous, maybe try the Local Security Policy options that do the same: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731963%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
Check more discussion of this question.