Default Printers on Terminal Server 2008 R2

If you have a Terminal Server 2008R2 which is used widely in your company and users need to use printers a lot, than you’ll face this default printer problem later or sooner. You can log on as the user on the terminal server, add the printers you would like and set the default printer like you would do on a normal workstation, but the default printer will change to the local machines default printer automatically. Let’s say you are using “comp1” in order to make a “Remote Desktop” connection to a terminal server which is called “Terminal”. Well, as an example, if you have “XPS Virtual Printer” set as a default printer on “comp1” and you make a remote desktop connection to the “Terminal” server, your default printer will be set to “XPS Virtual Printer” by default in the terminal server session. To avoid that action and keep the same printer as a default printer in terminal server sessions, you will need to follow these instructions;

If you want to change the behavior only for one user, then you can;

1-      Open “Active Directory Users and Computers” snap-in with a Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe)

2-      Find the user in your domain hierarchy, right click on the user and choose “Properties”

3-      From the “users Properties” window, go to “Environment” tab, under “Client devices” section, uncheck the “Default to main client printer” option and click “Apply”

If you want to change the behavior for all users who logs onto the Terminal Server, then you can;

1-      Open the “Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration” from the Terminal server.

2-      Under “Connections”, right click on “RDP-tcp” connection and choose “Properties”.

3-      From the “RDP-tcp Properties” window, go to “Client Settings” tab.

4-      Under the section of “Redirection”, check the checkbox “Default to main client printer” option in order to avoid the unwanted changes with the default printers while logging on a Terminal Server 2008 R2.