Thursday, 15 November 2007

HP LaserJet Monitor - zsHP1020.exe CPU Maxxed

We received a call from a client's user who was onsite complaining about their system no longer responding.

While trying to print something, the print job was sent to the wrong printer and the system eventually froze.

When the system was brought into the shop, this is what we found:

zsHP1020.exe Processes

There were literally hundreds of this one process firing up on the sytem.

First, we needed to unplug the printer and then shutdown the print spooler service: net stop spooler [Enter] from Start-->Run.

This did not fix the issue though. The system remained relatively unresponsive. The processes refused to be shut down via the "End Process" in the Task Manager.

We ended up needing to clean out any reference to the 1018, 1020, and 1022n LaserJet printers installed on the system. With the Print Spooler service shut down:
  1. Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\Spool\
  2. Delete any folders that contain zshp1020.exe et. al. executables
    • Note that the "Spool" and "3" folders may also contain other print drivers ... so only remove those folders and files that are relevant to the offending HP one.
    • Verify what other printers are installed on the system before removing anything.
  3. In this case, we removed all folders and files that were relevant.
  4. Start-->Run--> regedit [Enter]
  5. Find: LaserJet
  6. Delete only the folders that are relevant to the offending printer.
    • In this case we removed any registry folder named 1018, 1020, and 1022n
  7. Ignore the MRU (Most Recently Used) references
  8. Ignore the USB referenced locations ... &*3a... etc.
  9. Just delete the relevant HP LaserJet Printer named Folders!
Note that Safe Mode may be required for the above operation.

Once the \Spool directory and the registry are cleaned out, do a search for zsHP1020.exe and any others on the local hard drive including hidden and system folders. Either rename or send to the Recycle Bin the driver's folders found in this search.

Once the above steps have been taken, reboot the system, log into the user's profile, download the most recent driver for the printer, run the install routine, and plug in the printer when requested to do so.

Once the drivers have installed, run a test print out of Word or another program to make sure that everything is working. We were good to go from there.

References: Philip Elder
Microsoft Small Business Specialists



Anonymous said...

you problay cound use util in resource kit to remove the drivers too

Cleanspool or other util can,nt rember name of at moment


Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

I am not sure which utility you are speaking of?


Anonymous said...

This is bad and dangerous advice for the casual google user who comes across this.

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...


These instructions are aimed primarily at our peers though on occasion no IT professionals have found our instructions useful.

There is a caveat listed on our blog that states quite clearly what our position is with regards to anything here.

As always, test first, never on production systems, and then YMMV.