>I have a client that I'm moving to Terminal Services. It's a 64-bit box running Win2K3 64 bit and the application is done in VFP 9 SP 1. We're having some crashes that seem to be related to printing. As many of us know, printer drives used to sometimes play havoc with VFP, but mostly those problems have been fixed. But in this environment we may be encountering the same problems. The printers in use are HP 2420's. We are using the HP LaserJet 5000 Series PCL 6 driver because - and I'm a little sketchy on this - the native drivers are compatible with Terminal Services, I think. Also, these are USB printers and I believe Terminal Services really wants something hung on LPT1. So you can make these work using a different driver, but this may be the cause of the crashes.
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>I'm looking for some advice from anyone with experience running a VFP app on Terminal Services and how you get printing to work. The user needs to be able to print to the printer from a desktop app and the app running via Terminal Services. I think this was part of the issue, according to the network guys.
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>What the user sees is what I call the "grey screen of death" - the entire terminal window is grey, but they can still see the tab at the top that has the server's IP address, the close button, etc. I believe they then have trouble getting that to close and getting logged back in. What I see on the server is a error dialog that say the program experienced an error and had to close and it has the buttons for sending (or not) the error report to Microsoft.
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>So . . . any ideas or thoughts or best practices or whatever would be appreciated.
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>Russell Campbell
Russell,
I have been running terminal service applications on Windows server 2003 for several years and in the beginning had a lot of problems getting everyone's printers to work(probably 50 different types of printers- some local to the client machine and some on LANs). All of the problems were eventually tracked to the client machines. Some of things you might look for are:
1. Do all of the client machines have the latest terminal services updates.
2. Do all users have a default printer set in their profile and to the printer they want. If the set up is wrong they sometime end up trying or actually printing to printers attached to server or on printers attached by someone else to a LAN. Someone in the next building suddenly starts getting "mystery" reports printing on their local printer. The grey screen you describe sometimes happens when the report is being sent to a non authorized printer.
3 Look for this in the registry [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR]
"FilterQueueType"=dword:ffffffff

I have an instruction doc that shows the basics of how we set up our clients. If you want it I would be happy to email you a copy.
Sammie