Printer/Spooler Error correction

The other day I was cleaning up my registry (carefully I might add) deleting junk I knew was junk. A day or so later I needed to print and lo and behold there were no printers on the control panel and I kept getting an error 1068!!!!!!!!!!! So for the last day or so I have delved it to the morass of printer/spooler problems on the net. Well today I finally fixed the problem.

A while back our old Lexmark inkjet went south. So the other day I uninstalled the Lexmark miscellaneous programs/drivers. When I was cleaning up the other day some (lex***.***) entries were still in the registry so I deleted them also. I checked B4 I deleted any, on the internet to be sure each deleted key was not “important�.

After considerable browsing on the internet I was lead to check the spooler which I found was NOT started. Using services.msc I set all the recovery settings to "restart the service" but when I tried to start it again I received the error “lack of resources� and it stopped itself. It now became a bit frustrating. After 2 days of browsing I found an obscure HP fix for another similar error which was directly related to Lexmark printers.

Apparently in the registry at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\currentcontrolset\service\spooler
the key “dependonservice� when loading a Lexmark printer is set to “lexbcse.exeRPCSS�. Seems when you de-install the Lexmark stuff this key is NOT deleted and restored to its default value “RPCSS.� All I did is delete the :lexbcse.exe" part, rebooted and the spooler started again

Hope this helps someone!