Some print jobs fail when the Print to File option is used

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Devteam
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Joined: Fri Oct 14 2005
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Some print jobs fail when the Print to File option is used

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Related Products and Platforms
This newsletter relates to version 4.5 of Amyuni Document Converter printer driver, running under Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 multi-processor systems.

Problem Description
Some print jobs fail and generate a 0KB file when the Print to File option is used on a multiprocessor computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 and is under heavy stress. Additionnally, event 6161 might be raised in the event viewer. This problem seems to occur more frequently in version 4.5 compared to version 4.0 of PDF Converter.

Similar issues occur under Windows Vista and earlier versions of Windows 2008.

Cause and Resolution
Version 4.5 relies more heavily on the print spooler to generate the output PDF file. This improves multi-threading capabilities on 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows.

Microsoft support describes the cause of this issue to be:
This problem occurs because the Print Spooler service does not check the output file name correctly when the Print Spooler service assigns a file port to a print job. This behavior results in a timing issue when the computer is under heavy stress. This timing issue causes the Print Spooler service to use an incorrect output file name when the print job is handled. Therefore, the print job fails and generates the error message "Access is denied."
Please refer to knowledge-base article 2388144 for full details about this issue.

Fix
Microsoft has released a hotfix to resolve this issue. The hotfix is available from:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2388144

The hotfix was tested with Amyuni PDF Converter and correctly resolves this situation.
Amyuni Development Team

Efficient and accurate conversion to PDF, XPS, PDF/A and more. Free trials at - https://www.amyuni.com
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