When adding a printer / installing driver “The RPC server is unavailable”.
by Carl Farrington on Sep.19, 2008, under Computer Stuff, Tips & Tricks
This is due to the print spooler service not running, or dying during the install.
You may also find that the print spooler service frequently dies – “spoolsv.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close”, or the Printers and Faxes folder frequently appears empty – i.e. all your printers are missing.
NetSupport Manager or NetSupport PC Duo version 8 on Windows XP SP2 will cause this to happen. Update NetSupport and all will be well.
October 29th, 2008 on 11:13 pm
Hi Carl
Just a note for users of PC-Duo. From v10 onwards, May 2007, PC-Duo diverged from NetSupport and is founded on a different remote control software platform. It is now at v11 with support for Vista. AFAIK, the remote print works fine. Anyone curious should download a kit from http://www.vector-networks.com.
October 30th, 2008 on 9:53 am
That’s interesting to know. Does this explain why NSM 10 seems much slower than NSM9? Did they lose access to some code or something? As soon as NSM became Vista compatible, it seemed to stop being so fast and efficient on non-Vista platforms.