When deploying a new operating system there some things you should be aware of and most of these are covered, but there are some details that seems to be forgotten…

We are in the middle of deploying Windows 7 RC for a customer and most of the stuff works like a charm. We…

• Have done the inventory of systems using MAPS
• Have done the inventory for applications using ACT
• Have deployed the new systems using MDT2010 Beta 2
• Have used USMT included in MDT2010 with No configuration at all, just out of the box

and today one of the user calls me… Hi has a problem (how strange:-)) Word 2007 does not start, it just pops up and wait, like forever. All the other Office apps works fine, but Word is freezing up…

Reason:

Word is still loading the default printer driver when starting, the other Office applications does not do that, they behave “normally”, but Word… Anyway, the reason to freeze is that one printer driver was not “suitable” for Windows 7. When deploying with MDT2010 and doing a “refresh”, that is to save the state of the machine with USMT, wipe the disk clean (except for the “state”) install Windows 7 and restore state it brings the old printer settings back and when the customer was to use the printer it also got the old drivers from the print server. The solution was to replace the drivers and everything worked like a charm.

Lessen learned:

Even if all the tools on the planet tells you that all is god to go, please inventory all your printer and printer driver, verify that they work and verify that you can install the driver on the server to, since the driver on the server will be the driver that is handed out to the client. You may need to replace your printer server and in that case that will affect all the others and the small little pilot is getting big and ugly suddenly

Let me put it this way: Printer drivers are Applications