Using the Guest account to print into Print Distributor

If you try and print with the Guest account to a shared Print Distributor printer you will probably find print jobs disappear and entries will appear in the log file like this:

Note: This information does not apply to Print Distributor 3.1 or later

This is caused because when a print job first arrives it is written to the Windows default temporary folder but the guest account doesn't have permission to write to this folder so the temporary copy can't be created. To see if you are using the Guest account when you print (it isn't always obvious) just pause the Print Distributor printer and open the printer in your Printers folder, you can see the account for each job in the window:

To resolve the issue and get jobs printing correctly for this account the first thing we need to do is enable access to the \Windows\Temp folder for the Guest account, open the \Windows folder and right click on the Temp folder and select properties, select the Security tab and add the Guests group to the list of approved accounts. The permissions should look like this:

Finally we need to turn off meta file spooling in the printer, open the Printers folder and right click on the Print Distributor printer. Select properties from the menu then go to the Advanced tab. In here turn off the option "Enable advanced printing features" like this:

This should be enough to get the guest account working in most scenarios however in a small number of cases you may find that you are getting lots of empty files spooled. Generally these do not cause problems but if you are archiving your output then you may find many empty file get written. If you have Print Distributor version 3.1 or later installed you can disable these empty jobs using the Script action. In your list of actions for the virtual printer add a Script action and enter the following code:

After you have added this code move the Script action to the top of the list of actions. Print Distributor will now skip these empty jobs.