Q&A: “The server for the printer does not have the correct printer driver installed.” On Win XP from Server 2003?

Question by jjg004: “The server for the printer does not have the correct printer driver installed.” On Win XP from Server 2003?
I am getting the following message on my Windows XP clients after installing a new Brother HL-5250DN and a Xerox Phaser 8560N printers on our Windows 2003 server: “The server for the printer does not have the correct printer driver installed. If you want to search for the proper driver, click OK. Otherwise, Click cancel and contact your network administrator or original equipment manufacturer for the correct printer driver.” The driver works fine if I install it as a local printer on each Windows XP machine. I’m using the same driver on the Windows 2003 server where I’m sharing the printers. I found a post that stated it could be due to security settings on the %systemdir%\system32\spool\drivers folder and I double-checked those settings. I even went as far setting the everyone group to full access on the spool\drivers folder, but that didn’t help. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best answer:

Answer by ogre351
We have a similar problem with a new Windows 2003 print server and Windows XP clients. The error occurs when connecting initially, if the driver does not exist on the client machine. If the error is ignored and another attempt is made to connect, the driver downloads to the client and print jobs can be sent successfully.

The Windows 2003 server is a replacement for a Windows 2000 print server that does not have this problem. By the way the ‘print$ ‘ share has the same exact permissions between the two servers and it seems by default the ‘Everyone’ group has read permissions set.

The only way I was able to fix this was to replace the print driver on the server with a digitally signed version. After replacing the driver, workstations were able to connect without this error.

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