Error 481 in Windows Terminal server

Hello,

We are encountering the following problem:

We use PDF creator on our WTS for several years without any problems. But now I hit one...

To lower the i/o load on our WTS, we started to use "folder redirection" in GPO. We redirect Application Data , Desktop and the start menu to a share on the File-Server. The "My Documents Folder" was already redirected without a problem. This is well documented and supported by Microsoft

But it breaks PdfCreator 0.9.8 / 0.9.9 and 1.0.0 preview 27/05/2010.

It works great without Folder redirection, but when Folder redirection is active, Printing to PDF hits error 481 (invalid picture) in modul "modMain" in procedure "StartProgram" at Line51700 (v0.9.9). It looks that it tried to start "Pdfcreator.exe" but somehow failed. Pdfcreator is not popping up to foreground, but is visible in the process list.

I've  found a work around, but this rather recourse expensive. When starting the PDF print monitor manually (pdfcreator.exe) printing works ok. But pdfcreator consumes about 28Mb memory just being Idle. This expensive starting the PDF print monitor in at start-up for every user on the WTS.

Is there a way around?

regards,

John

Hi,

I've thought about this, but because pdfcreator.exe didn't create a subfolder in %APPDATA%, (Application Data in WinXP / Win2003) I didn't expect it needed access to it.

I also do not understand why it only happens in Terminal Server Application Mode.. On a Win7 workstation with folder redirection the problem does not occur.

Frank, could you enlighten this?

In the mean time I do test with the spooler account, and post the results later.

thank you.

John

 

Hi,

It seems not so easy to start the spooler with a domain admin account. It failes to start with the following error:

Could not start the Print Spooler service on Local Computer. Error 12 : the access code is invalid".

 

Hi John,

this problem is known. The printer spooler runs with an system account and this account has no read\\write access for network drives. Disable folder redirections or start the spooler service as domain administrator (or with an account that has read\\write access for the users folders).

I hope this helps.

Sorry for bringing an old thread to live but we are having the same problem. I belive this is a pretty common setup. Wouldnt it be possible to impersonate the user from the spool process when launching the application?