I am the network administrator on a LAN of about 25 PCs, most of them are running new Dell Optiplx computers with Windows 7 Professional (2x64 with 8GB and the rest x32 with 4GB) also from Dell. We have 2 network printers residing on Windows 2003 servers in a Microsoft domain. 3 to 5 times a day the users will go into something like Word 2003 and see a dull white rectangle over the entire application and a blue spinning circle. If I go look at Devices and Printers, I get the same white area. It will continue until the Print Spooler Service is stopped then restarted. At that point everything seems OK. None of the printers are setup for bi-directional printing. This happens on computers that have local printers and those that only have the network printers, which are Xerox WorkCentre 7675 PS and 7335 PS copier/printers with the most current drivers, I tried a vbs script to restart spooler every 15 minutes but that didn't fix the problem. Anybody have any suggestions?

Try this, in particular the bit about EnableProtocols in HKLM, something to do with a new way Windows 7 prints that Windows 2003 does not understand and the Windows 7 spooler shows the behaviour you describe above. We had this problem, and this change solved the problem for us. Cheers, Rob