Microsoft confirms 3 new Windows 10 and Windows 11 Printer issues

The recent discovery of major vulnerabilities in the printer stack of Windows and its subsequent remediation appears to have caused major compatibility issues with Windows 11, with Microsoft confirming 3 new printer-related issues for their newly released operating system. Notable the issue also affects Windows 10, and the issue appears to be confined to enterprise printing, which uses more complex protocols.

The issues are:

Installation of printers might fail when attempted over some network connections

Devices that attempt to connect to a network printer for the first time might fail to download and install the necessary printer drivers.

This issue has been observed in devices that access printers via a print server, using HTTP connections. When a client connects to the server to install the printer, a directory mismatch occurs, which causes the installer files to generate incorrectly. As a result, the drivers may not download.

Workaround: IT administrators with admin privileges can still install printer drivers on the client through other means, such as copying packaged drivers from a known good package location. Only the automatic download and installation processes are impacted by this issue.

Custom printing properties might not be correctly provided to print server clients

Printing properties defined on that server might not be correctly provided to clients. Note this issue is specific to print servers and does not impact standard network printing. This issue will not cause printing operations to fail, however, custom settings defined on the server – for example, duplex print settings – will not be applied automatically, and clients will print with default settings only.

This issue results from an improper building of the data file which contains the printer properties. Clients which receive this data file will not be able to use the file content and will instead proceed with default printing settings. Servers which use default print settings and have no custom settings to provide to clients are unaffected.

Workaround: IT administrators with admin privileges can still install printer drivers on the client through other means, such as copying packaged drivers from a known good package location. Additionally, clients can still be modified manually to adopt desired printer settings.

Installation of printers via Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) might not succeed

Installation of printers using Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) might not complete successfully.

Microsoft is working on a resolution for all the issues and targeting its release in a future update.