Had a customer who’s printer was showing off-line or grayed-out. They removed it and did a search for it but it didn’t come back.

I had an IP address in our documentation and I could interface with the printer through the browser. The printers were connected via USB to the server.

I tried a straight restarting of the spooler, but that didn’t get the printer back online.  The following tip helped me solve this issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN81kBdIvSA

Here is what I did to solve the issue.

1. Stop the print spooler on the server
2. Go to “C:\Windows\System32\spool\Printers” and cleared this directory out by deleting all files in there.
3. Started the spooler again.
4. I had to go back to the users machine and add the printer again.

Let us know if this helped you…