Citrix print management service crashing

Awhile back I posted about cleaning up print drivers in XA4.5. Recently I started to have issues again with printers not being auto created with what appeared to be the same issue of the spooler crashing and taking the Citrix service with it. Oddly it wasn't logging the crash though.

(see this post: http://didyourestart.blogspot.com/2009/04/terminal-server-citrix-printing-errors.html)

It then occurred to me that it's not the same issue! Duh

On a pool of 8 XenApp 5.0 (windows 2003) with R07 installed I've found that occasionally the Citrix Print Management Service will crash.  Note that in this instance the Print Spooler is NOT crashing, only the Citrix Service.  I determined this by using the script in my other printing issue post so that it would log when the print spooler crashed.  In this case no log was ever generated on the servers after a failure.

I then added a new short script and set it to run on failure of the Citrix Print Management Service.  On the next failure sure enough I had my log showing the failure time.

Batch File contents
net start "Citrix Print Manager Service"
SET logfile=C:\AdminTools\CitrixCrashLogs.log
ECHO Citrix print management service crashed on %date% at %time% on %computername% >> %Logfile%

I then set the Citrix Print Management Service to run this program on failure.

This tells me that it's a different issue causing the failure of the Citrix service since print spooler isn't actually crashing.  I believe this is an issue that was introduced sometime post R05 as I never had the issue (that I'm aware of) until updating to R07.  Note that I had skipped installing R06.  I also tested this on a fresh Citrix build with the same results.

I now implement the above batch file as part of my build on all XenApp servers.  This has reduced the help desk calls for this issue down to 1 or less a quarter.