Printer issues are back at it on Windows 11 22H2 as well

For those that follow Windows news pretty regularly, you are probably aware of the PrintNightmare saga. In a nutshell, it was a security vulnerability in the Windows print spooler service. This service handles print jobs and related protocols on servers and client PCs.

Printing issues on Windows 11, and sometimes also in Windows 10, haven't stopped there as there have been bugs outside of the PrintNightmare flaw too. And it looks like reports of first such issues have started coming in. Twitter user and IT engineer Thomas Førde found out their network printers had gone missing after updating to the Windows 11 22H2 feature update. When they tried to manually add back the printers, they were greeted with a "0x00000bc4" error code which typically signifies an "operation could not be completed" message.

After digging around the issue, Førde discovered the problem that was preventing Windows 11 22H2 from identifying their network printers. Apparently, the printer policy in the 2022 feature update was set wrong by default. The Remote Procedure Call (RPC) connection settings need to be set to "RPC over named pipes" transport protocol for the printers to be identified.

While the workaround works in this case, Microsoft cautions against allowing a large number of idle pending calls on the server while using this protocol. By doing so it can create a high demand for kernel memory.