Invalid user profile path printer driver problem

[support@abaca.co.uk]

This is more for information really, yesterday we had another odd issue with the PDF-XChange Printer driver that we had never seen before, however we have now solved this particular problem.

The background is as follows.

On one of our sites the company were running Small Business Server as their domain controller, our system was hosted on a separate Windows 2008 R2 box on their domain.

The symptom was that after our customers hardware support people made some changes to the Domain yesterday all our PDF Printing stopped working, which was pretty inexplicable as they had not touched the server that our stuff was running on at all.

Anyway after a lot of debugging we proved that the PDF-XChange driver was still physically capable of generating a PDF if we committed the unlock code and let it produce a PDF with the Demo markers but every time we passed the unlock credentials and the instructions to save on a particular path it looked like it was doing it, progress bar came up (we switched that on to see what was happening) but the PDF never appeared.

We knew the filename we were generating so we searched the entire disk to see if it was being generated elsewhere but sure enough it was not, we checked permissions on the folders and loads of other stuff but could not get to the bottom of it.

My colleague then tried to install Adobe Acrobat on this server and it failed, up popped a message about a profile path that could not be opened!

So it turned out that the hardware support people had renamed the Domain controller and the Admin user account that our code was running under now had an invalid profile path, so I am guessing that something in PDF-XChange required access to that path maybe for working storage or something?

Note that the printer worked in demo mode but never worked at all in this scenario when being programmatically controlled.

The problem for us was that this was very hard to diagnose, I think this is a situation where the printer driver should have been throwing an exception in order to give us a hint as to where exactly the problem lay.

Really just posting this one in case anyone else comes across this particular problem, the basic cause is an invalid user profile path, once that is fixed everything works again.

This installed version of the PDF-XChange driver was build 201.


Jim

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Thanks for this Jim,

I hope it will be useful if anyone else encounters such a problem.
And we will now discuss this in the team further and see what we can do to make this easier to debug in the future.

Best,
Stefan