Multiple printer instances from ScreenConnect

When we onboarded a client last year, a VIP reported seeing duplicate printers on her computer. No one else at the firm of around 20 people had the same issue, and the duplicates were of both physical and virtual printers, like OneNote and Adobe PDF, so we knew it wasn't a system issue.

The duplicate printers were in this format: "Printer Name (First name Last name) (10-character alpha-numeric code)"

I deleted them, but they returned a few days.

I got frustrated enough that I created a one-liner to remove them, and although it worked, only ran so often, which allowed the duplicate printers to appear once in a while.

Remove-Printer -Name "*(First Last) (*"

Her computer wasn't Windows 11-compatible, so we replaced it and then the unthinkable happened: THE DUPLICATE PRINTERS RETURNED! 🤯

I was able to prove to myself that ScreenConnect was creating the duplicate printers by:

1. Deleting all of the duplicate printers
2. Disconnecting the ScreenConnect session
3. Reconnecting and confirming that there were no duplicates
4. Turning on redirected printers in ScreenConnect, after which the duplicate printers reappeared.

Armed with those results, I opened a case with ScreenConnect:

When we onboarded a new client a year ago, one person at the company reported that she saw duplicates of her local printers when she remoted into her work desktop computer. After much troubleshooting, we decided to replace her computer due to its age.

Today, months later, she reported that the duplicate printers have returned, so I resumed my investigation by remoting into her personal computer and then remoting into her work computer.

I confirmed that the duplicate printers were present. I turned off remote printing in the SC session, deleted all of the duplicate local printers, disconnected, reconnected, and confirmed that none of the duplicate printers were present.

After a minute or two, I re-enabled "All printer" after which the duplicates immediately reappeared, so it's clearly a ScreenConnect issue. I noted that this problem was solved years ago, but we're still experiencing what looks to be the same behavior: https://docs.connectwise.com/ScreenConnect_Documentation/ScreenConnect_release_notes/ConnectWise_Control_2022.10_Release_notes

ScreenConnect replied that this can happen when a print job is stuck in a print queue.

Although my client hasn't scheduled another support session to troubleshoot this, at least ScreenConnect acknowledged that it's a flaw in their code.

/ticketclosed