I develop a Winforms application written with framework 2.0, which has some Server Reports in Report Server (SQLServer 2005).
This reports in the test enviroment are printing just right, but in production weird things happens (as ussual).
Sometimes, the windows spooler sends the print job to the printer and the printer acknowledge the job, but it prints nothing, like it was a empty job. When this happens, and we try a second time to print the report, it print just the first pages and then, one or two pages with formatting errors and garbage.
This has been reported on at least two models of printers, one via LAN and one via LPT1.
We have tried printing from the production environment to the testing printers, and the reports came out fine.
The same printers are used with other software (not using report server: Word, acrobat, other in-house developments) without any issue, for years.
Could this be a software issue, a configuration (network policies, permissions, restrictions)?
Update: The printers via LAN are going through a print server. We did some additional testing and we found that this may be a problem with windows server 2000 and the printer drivers beeng old. We changed to a print server running windows server 2003 and the situation got better, no more garbage printed, but some times, the printer does not finish the job and throws a "PCL Error"