One damaged print job, sitting in one folder, can crash your spooler at every start and block every printer on the PC. Deleting it from the queue window will not work — this is the folder method that always does.
The print queue shows a job stuck on Error, delete does nothing, and every restart brings it back. That job lives as files on disk, and this guide removes them directly: stop the service, empty C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, start the service, test small. Clean, copy-paste ready, no tools needed.
C:\Windows\System32> net stop spooler
The Print Spooler service is stopping.
The Print Spooler service was stopped successfully.
C:\Windows\System32> net start spooler
The Print Spooler service is starting.
The Print Spooler service was started successfully.
When you print, Windows does not send the document straight to the printer. It writes the job to disk first as two files — an .SPL file with the print data and an .SHD file with the job settings — inside C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS. The spooler then feeds those files to the printer.
If one of those files is corrupt — the PC lost power mid-print, the app crashed while printing, the driver choked on a strange document — the spooler can crash every time it tries to process that job. And because the spooler works through the folder in order, one dead job blocks and crashes everything behind it. Deleting from the print queue window often fails at this point, because the queue itself is what is broken. The folder route below always works.
You cannot delete job files while the service is holding them open. Stop it first, from an administrator Command Prompt:
net stop spooler and wait for the stopped successfully messageservices.msc, right-click Print Spooler → StopNow delete the stuck jobs directly:
C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS (approve the admin prompt if asked)Run net start spooler, then print one small test page — a single page of plain text — before resending the big document that got stuck.
If the test page prints, resend the original document. If the spooler dies again on that same document, the document or that printer's driver is the problem — convert the document to PDF and print the PDF, and treat the driver as a suspect from that point.
Do not delete the whole spool folder or the spoolsv.exe file — the first removes folders Windows needs, the second breaks printing entirely. Do not use registry cleaners or random spooler repair tools from download sites; this job needs two commands and one folder, nothing more.
And do not skip the test print. Clearing the folder and immediately sending fifty pages means that if the driver is the real fault, you will be clearing the folder again in ten minutes.
The full print spooler repair — finding the real culprit and stopping the crash loop — is shown step by step in the video.
▶️ Watch Full VideoThat is exactly the case the folder method exists for. When a job is corrupt, the queue window cannot remove it because the spooler itself is stuck on it. Stop the spooler with net stop spooler, delete the files in C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, and start the service again — the ghost job is gone.
No. The .SPL and .SHD files are temporary copies Windows made for printing. Your original document — the Word file, the PDF — is untouched in its folder. You will simply need to print it once more after the cleanup.
Then the stuck job was never your problem. An empty folder with a still-crashing spooler points at a printer driver. Open Event Viewer, find the Application Error event for spoolsv.exe, and read the faulting module name — that names the driver to repair or remove.