We are seeing more and more clients upgrade their PCs to Windows 7 and whilst on the whole the experience is much improved for both them as users and us as administrators, there have been a few annoying niggles with Printer Sharing in Windows 7. After much tinkering and researching we have a confirmed fix for one of the more troublesome problems:

You try to connect a Windows 7 (32x or 64x) to a shared printer and you recieve the typically obscure error message: Windows Cannot Connect to the printer error 0x0000007e

Googleing this brings up all kind of suggested fixes from installing hot fixes, to removing all printers from the server and re-adding them. Hidden away in Google is the answer though and here it is:

On the PC which is serving out  the printer (usually a server or the PC into which the printer is plugged directly), fire up RegEdit by clicking start and typing regedit into the search bar or run window.

Expand the tree in regedit until you get to this path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlPrintPrinters

Under the printers path will be a list of the printers you have installed.

Expand the tree for the troubelsome printer and if you see a subfolder called CopyFiles delete it.

Hey Presto if you try and add the printer to a PC now it will work without issue.