Fix the Spooler with FixIt
It took me many hours to solve the following problem. At startup Windows started to issue warnings about the spooler system and finally it announced “Windows has closed Spooler SubSystem App”. My system is XP with automatic updates. Given the hundreds of complaints on the Internet I am not the only one having that problem.
No sweat: you go to a Microsoft website and you download a FixIt and run it. Well the fix did a lot, except fixing my problems. Suddenly the Spooler service spoolsv.exe disappeared from the list of services. And starting it myself was of no avail. Again downloaded a Microsoft FixIt and run it. This time the Spooler was back, but all my printers were gone.
Adobe PDF printer
Smart developers at Adobe put in all their products, including Adobe Acrobat, a repair option in their setup. So I had my Adobe PDF printer back in 1 minute.
HP printer
My HP printer was different. I had to fully uninstall and reinstall it. Happily I discovered that temporarily disabling ESET NOD32 anti-virus sped up my reinstalling by an order of magnitude
Fax service
But the real disaster still had to come: the Fax service. The Fax printer was not in my list of printers any more. I run the Fax program form Accesories>Communications>Fax. But the fax did not appear as printer in the list of printers. In the list of services no fax service was showing up. I went to Add/Remove programs in Control Panel and clicked on Windows Components. The Fax service was still checked, so I unchecked it. Clicked OK. Restarted the computer as a measure of precaution and checked the Fax service again to reinstall it. Then the disaster happened. All kind of SetUp errors were showing up, basically telling me that dll’s were not there. I found the dll’sfrom everywhere, including the dllcache. But the problem was not that the dll’s were not there: they *were* there, but SetUp refused to copy them. After a long search and many restarts I discovered on a Microsoft website that the problem is that “Secedit.sdb database file is corrupted”. And “The master database for security settings is contained in the Secedit.sdb database file.’ I coyuld reset this file, but I was warend that this would occur withy a loss of (some?) security settings. As I am the only user of my computer I decided to gamble and to reset the data base file: I ran from a DOS-box esentutl /p %windir%\security\database\secedit.sdb.
Lo and behold: my fax is back. Unfortunately all my faxes sent in the past are gone.
