Snafui.com - Removing Printer Events from EventLog

Problem

Every time you connect to a terminal server it maps and unmaps your local printers which leaves warnings in the Windows eventlog. Every time you print it leaves information events in the eventlog. Sometimes these events are unwanted and clutter up the System event log. Especially if you are using something like the ntsyslog project.

Solution

Microsoft recommends going to the Printers Control Panel. Clicking the File menu and choosing Server Properties. Click the Advanced tab and uncheck the warning and information events boxes. Since I needed to roll this out to many servers at once (along with NTSyslog), I made a .reg file to make these changes for me. Here are the registry keys that need to be changed.

		[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Providers]
		"EventLog"=dword:00000001

		[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Print\Providers]
		"EventLog"=dword:00000001

The number represents what you want to log. Here's the chart:

So if you wanted to see Errors and Warnings, you add the numbers 1 and 2 and that's your dword value. For example: "EventLog"=dword:00000003
If you wanted to see Errors, Warnings, and Information (the default), you add 1 and 2 and 4 to equal 7. In my case all I want is Errors so my dword value is 1.

A full .reg file of this example is available here: printer_eventlog.reg (in regedit4 style for backwards compatibility with WinNT).