Hide Printers and Devices in Control Panel

We can hide the Add Devices and Printers category in Control Panel with the following group policy. We can then add a shortcut that takes users directly to their printers. The advantage in this is that we hide the devices and printers category and users get a better experience, but the downside is this only seems to allow a desktop shortcut.

Navigate to User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Control Panel.

Double-click Hide specified control panel items in the right pane, select Enable, click Show button, and typeMicrosoft.DevicesAndPrinters

Once this policy is in place, we go to Regedit and create this following Entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Desktop\NameSpace\
Create a New Key {2227a280-3aea-1069-a2de-08002b30309d}

Create Citrix Session Printers with powershell script

During a farm migration moving across printer session policies is a tedious task.

The best method is to use my Printer management tool www.PrintMap.co.uk This is a simple GUI way to manage printers. Its lightning fast and easy to install and is designed to suit Xenapp\XenDesktop but is supported on all desktop delivery and application delivery methods.

The following allows you to script this in powershell with the help of the Citrix.common.GroupPolicy cmdapplet.

This should hopefully make life a bit easier.

Create a new Policy
new-item XenApp Farm Policy:\Users\PrintPol

Create a Session Printer
set-itemproperty LocalFarmGPO:\Users\PrintPol\Settings\ICA\Printing\SessionPrinters -name values "\\server\printer,model=Printer Model Name,Location=Location"

Filter the Policy
set-itemproperty LocalFarmGPO:\Users\PrintPol\Filters\User\user@domain.com

Set Default Printer
Set-itemproperty LocalFarmGPO:\Users\PrintPol\Settings\ICA\Printing\DefaultClientPrinter -name value "\\server\printer"

Disable or enable a Policy
set-itemproperty "LocalFarmGPO:\User\PrintPol" -name enabled -value false

Word Watermark print missing letters

Problem
We had a reported fault with a HP Color 5550 Printer that printed out watermark text with characters missing. The document (Microsoft Word document) failed to print correctly from multiple machines. The Driver for the printer was the HP Universal PCL 5 which has been serving us well. The document printed ok on other model printers.

The document when printed would print all the main text ok, but the watermark would be missing random characters for example the word "draft" was on some pages only showing "d r t" and other pages "a f"

Resolution
The resolution to this fault was to turn of semi-transparency in Microsoft word. This is found under Format, Background, Printed Watermark

Citrix Prevent Admins installing Printer Drivers

Im sure everyone knows the dangers of having uncontrolled printer drivers on terminal servers.
A common problem i have encountered is support staff with admin rights accidently installing drivers without realising. This can happen quite easily with users who RDP or ICA direct to the server with their locally attached printers mapped. Although there are Citrix policy and AD group policys to say "Dont install any drivers" these often seem to have little impact and we commonly see Printer drivers suddenly arrive.

To Prevent this at my current site NTFS permissions for admins and system accounts have been set to read only on the directory
C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86
We have a single specialist admin account with full control which we can use when we need to install a new driver.

Citrix has just published an article on this subject and advises a similar step but on the registry rather than file permissions. They advise in article CTX120618 to set Admin and System accounts to read access on the following registry key to prevent accidental printer driver installation

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows NT x86\Drivers\Version-3

Autocreated Client Printers Not creating

This fault occured after permission on the ICA Channel was altered by an administrator.

The CTX_SMAUser account requires virtual channel permissions to map local client printers correctly. It also need query information permission. This permission had been removed and needed to be put back to correct the fault.

An alternative is to add the CTX_SMAUser account to the administrators group as this account has be known to have alot of issues due to it not being an admin account by default but requires a whole reft of special priveleges in order for the server to function correctly.

Citrix Advanced Print Functions

Advanced Printing Functions can be controlled with the DefaultPrnFlags key.
This is located in
HKLM\Software\Citrix\Print

see the advanced concept guide for details on all the settings available.

But heres a few good ones. Add the values together to add multiple settings.

80 = Override policys and TS settings
10 = Force Legacy Printer names
200 = No UPD driver fallback
4000 = Admins can see users printers
8000000 = Stop Eventlog errors for autocreated printer errors (save lots of entries)

DefaultPrnFlags Advanced Print functions

Advanced Printing Functions can be controlled with the DefaultPrnFlags key.
This is located in
HKLM\Software\Citrix\Print

See the advanced concept guide for details on all the settings available
80 = Override policys and TS settings
10 = Force Legacy Printer names
200 = No UPD driver fallback
4000 = Admins can see users printers
8000000 = Stop Eventlog errors for autocreated printer errors (save lots of entries)