Xerox Type 4 driver and Windows Server 2012 R2 issue - Citrix environment (hosted)

[Joe Arseneau · Accepted solution]

You would need to call Xerox to have them look at it officially, this is a peer to peer forum.

Having said that. While a Class driver is indeed a V4 driver, they have different origins.

Class drivers come from Microsoft, V4 drivers come from the manufacturer of the printer (in this case Xerox)

What appears to have happened here is that the Windows update replaced the V4 driver with a Class driver (MS does this in Win10 as well) and caused the issue.

V4 printer drivers

The v4 print driver model provides a simple but flexible management experience. V4 print drivers can be distributed via Windows Update or Windows Software Update Services (WSUS), but are not distributed to print clients from the print server.

Some of the benefits of v4 drivers are:

• Printer sharing does not require the installation of device specific drivers that match the client architecture

• Driver files are isolated from each other, preventing driver file name conflicts

• A single driver can support a single device or multiple devices

• Drivers are typically smaller than version 3 drivers, and installation times are faster than comparable version 3 drivers

• Administrators can deploy printer user interface separately from the printer driver

Print Class Drivers

Using the v4 driver model, IHVs can provide Print Class Drivers that support features that are common to a broad set of devices that use the same printer description language, such as PCL, PS, or XPS. The print drivers included with Windows Server 2012 are Print Class Drivers and will always have the text “class driver” in their display name.

Print Class Drivers also provide the following benefits:

• Driver packages are smaller and printer driver files are less likely to cause stability problems

• Administrators have fewer drivers to manage

• Class drivers can support future devices that haven't been released yet

Model Specific Drivers

You can get model specific v4 drivers directly from the printer manufacturers web site or from Windows Update.

Further reading 1

Further reading 2

Further reading 3

Citrix specific

[StaceyGoldberg]

Recently we patched a clients Servers (2012R2) and since September, we have had a huge issue with no users being able to add Type 4 drivers. We have tried swapping to Type 3 and this does work but it means that the entire company has to run type 3 and the whole print server re-configured. I was wondering if you could log something with Xerox to see if anyone else has had this issue recently and if Xerox has a fix or if this is Solely a Microsoft issue. The errors when trying to add a Type 4 driver are below Once you click on you get a Access denied Error Any insight or help to resolve this as we would prefer to use Type 4 drivers in the future

We currently have WC6605/ Phaser 7100/ Phaser 3620/ Versalink C7030 models printing on this site?