No printers installed

But the new creator is a 64 bit program ?

I get this error on 5 computers. But on the 30 others installation was going fine

I get this messege to.
Message = Access to the path ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\DRIVERS\x64\PSCRIPT5.dll’ is denied.

Hi,

this could mean that the file (postscript printer driver) is either still in use or has broken permissions. Have you tried to delete it manually?

Best regards,

Robin

Yes I have but it still dont work.

Possible Solution

I ran Process Monitor and saw two "access denied" events when PDFCreator tried to fix this missing installed printer.

PDFCreator.exe	RegOpenKey	HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\setup\PnpLockdownFiles	ACCESS DENIED
PrinterHelper.exe	CreateFile	C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\PS_SCHM.GDL	ACCESS DENIED

Edit the registry key PnpLockdownFiles with full control for administrators and added 'Everyone' with read access. Then I renamed the PS_SCHM file to something else. This allowed running the PDFCreator and the printer installed successfully. Keep things clean by renaming the PS_SCHM file back to default.

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1 Like

I’ve read this thread with interest. I’ve had PDF Creator installed for many years without any problems - a really neat and useful program. I went to use it today; was told there was a new version, that all settings would be retained. Since I last did an update (many moons ago), I’ve switched to a 64-bit machine (Windows 7; formerly XP) - I’ve no idea if that’s relevant, but what I do know is that I now have a program that’s unusable - I’ve had the same error messages as described above. None of the above solutions seems to work - or if they do, the methods are beyond my comprehension; I do not feel competent to edit the registry, largely because I have no idea how to do so - and I can’t help thinking if it needs that sort of fix, there’s something really not right with the program
 I know the program is free (thank you!), so perhaps I’m asking too much. But I just wonder whether perhaps there is a bug in the program installer? I do regret updating. It worked just fine before.

Hi,

we are currently (again) looking into the component of the setup responsible for installing/updating the printer to see if we can make it more stable.
Did you try running the printerhelper.exe commands form above (this doesn’t require editing the registry)?

Best regards,

Robin

Good day,

We are having the exact same issue when updating PDFCreator version (Windows 10 x64) i.e. printers are wiped clean by the update and “PDFCreator was not able to repair
 etc.” on first run, HOWEVER in our case the pdfhelper procedure works just fine and installs the (default) printer even though the installer itself fails to recreate the printers which were previously set up.

Of course once we get the default printer up we can manually rebuild our printers (we use about 10 printers for fast profile access) but it’s still a showstopper when it comes to updating. Which is a shame.

Any tests we can run to help you diagnose the issue?

(Thank you for a great product by the way.)

Hi,

thanks a lot for the feedback and offering your help.
The component responsible for instaling/updating the printer has just been rewritten and it will probably be possible to share you a test build of this soon. Please contact support(at)pdfforge.org so we can send you a link by mail.

Best regards,

Robin

I did run printerhelp.exe but it did nothing - I just got the same message ‘PDF Creator was not able to repair your printers. Please contact your administrator etc’. So I await developments (having read the more recent replies) with interest!

I entcountered the same problem last week.
None of the multiple action I did solved the problem.
So I uninstalled PDFCreator. I Went throw the register and removed all keys refering to PDFCreator, they are many.
The key most of the time and the value when it was a reference to PDFCreator by an other component.
I reboot the computer, and finally I Installed PDFCreator. And it worked.

A bit risky but working!

Regards

I tried nearly everything here. No PDFcreator printer ever installs. I've haven't done anything profound to my hardware or operating system. W8 pro. Pity, I've used PDFcreator for years, donated once, but since I conducted a routine upgrade (up from 2.3), done many incremental upgrades before, never a hitch...I CANNOT PRINT TO PDF ANYMORE.

I tried the spooler cleanout
Sterilizing PDFcreator in regedit
simple install without architect
install with antivirus disabled
more besides

Hola,

He seguido los pasos pero sigo sin tener la impresora instalada. Al ejecutar printerHelper desde cmd, no obtengo ningĂșn error, pero no hace nada.
Espero tu ayuda.

Gracias!

Hi,

which arguments did you call the printerhelper.exe with?
Is there a PDFCreator driver and pdfcmon monitor installed on the machine?
If you have the driver and the monitor but no printer, try running printerhelper.exe /addprinter “Name of your printer”

Best regards,

Robin

Finally fixed it. Running it in commandline revealed the same issue of “Unhandled Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\DRIVERS\x64\PS_SCHM.GDL’ is denied.”

So I just enabled all permissions for that file. First you have to make yourself the “Owner” : Right Click, Properties, Security tab, “Advanced” button", at the top there is “Owner:”, click “Change” to the right of that, find your user and set it. Then press OK all the way out. Come back into Properties/Security, Edit permissions, give everyone full control. Then reinstall the printer (commandline or GUI attempt from PDFCreator).

1 Like

Hi,

thanks for posting your solution. We will try to make this more stable in future.

Best regards,

Robin

Hello, I have the same problem. When I install have the message "PrinterHelper" error. I follow all instruction. Reinstall de PDFCreator, Fix, Delete from registry ctmon, and all. I buy de PDF Creator for Terminal Server, and have a Windows 2012 r2 server. I try form cmd PrinterHelper.exe install and have this error:Exepcion no controlada: pdfforge cant find pdfforge.printerhelper.implementarion.Win32Printer.addprinter ......

Can you help me, thanks

Hi,

did you install the latest Version 2.5.3? Please contact support(at)pdfforge.org with the setuplog.txt, which gets placed into the main PDFCreator folder during the installation. We will help you to resolve the issue.

Best regards,

Robin

Thank you Man. It worked for me.