Thunderbird appears to halt Windows 11 print spooler
New install on a friend's HP laptop. Thunderbird was setup with profile imported from older laptop running Windows 10. Printer is an HP Smart Tank Plus 655.
Printing works fine on other apps such as Word, browsers, notepad, Acrobat. Start up Thunderbird and can successfully print one document, but subsequent attempts at printing from Tbird show 'Print as PDF' and no other print options in the print dialog box. Attempting to print via other apps produces same result.
Restarting print spooler works temporarily. Other fixes found on forums such as the 'remove addons.json from profile folder' fix dont work.
Have also reinstalled Thunderbird, checked spooler settings, reinstalled printer drivers, with no resolution. Interestingly, I installed Thunderbird on another windows 11 laptop, with a new profile and following Thunderbird's email account setup wizard and I have no printing issues.
Could this be related to importing the old profile across to Windows 11? Or are there other issues at play?
Thanks.
All Replies (3)
It is most likely related to trying to use an older printer configuration on the new system.
Thunderbird manages this part of itself rather poorly unfortunately. Often keeping details of printers that have not existed for years in the configuration. You can sometimes find yourself in the config editor deleting lot and lots of setting related to defunct printers, but usually simply removing the printer.print setting and restarting Thunderbird will fix printer selection issues.
Nothing has changed since this https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1266075
Thanks for the reply.
I'll try deleting printer.print, but if that doesn't work, would the next step involve exporting out data such as emails, contacts, etc, and then reinstalling Thunderbird with a brand new profile, setting up the email accounts, and then importing in the emails, etc?
no it would involve deleting all the entries in the config edit printer. part for non installed printers. or just everything and restarting Thunderbird.
Most config settings are only read on startup and are actually committed the the prefs file on shut down. So changes can not be considered "applied" until Thunderbird restarts.