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[El Guru (Al)]

My HP Printer tends to get temperamental at times at will error out on a print job. Problem is if I try to remove the job in the Printer Queue it just stuck in there until I reboot the computer. Well, rebooting is not always something I am able to do right away as I have other things going on. After some searching I found some command prompts that will reset the printer spooler thus clearing out the items stuck in the queue. This may work on other versions of Windows as well.

Go to start/run
Type: net stop spooler. This will close all open jobs.
To restart, type: net start spooler

[bdawg923 (Max)]

What happens if you just restart the printer instead of rebooting the PC? That doesn't help?

[El Guru (Al)]

Restarting the printer doesn't do anything as Windows had already decided an error occurred and gives up and printing the documents.

[Ryan Wagner]

You know I've had this problem before where removing items from the queue always work, and I've always had to restart my computer. This is a handy little trick.

[Deadlock]

In addition to El Gurus hint another one (we're using this thingy for ages on our Windows Server Farm at the office after a server crashes)

While having stopped the spooler service, travel to C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS and remove all content named *.SHD (Spool header, description of what's coming) and *.SPL (Spool, the print data). The SPL-files can grow quite big, depending on the type of printer (-language) and the type of document, i.e. some 200++-pages PDF printed to a LaserJet 4 Compatible (using PCL 4 (or 5? Not sure...) ) can truly use huge amounts of hard disk space.

After that, start the spooler service and you're ready to go.