In our company, we have several Windows 98 systems connected to our domain. These systems are mainly there for some old programs that couldn’t be migrated to Windows XP. When it comes to printing, these Win98 machines are connected to printers that are shared from a server that is running Windows Server 2003. The printings have been working fine until yesterday when all Win98 machines receives the following error.

There was a problem printing to the printer due to an unknown system error. Restart Windows, and then try printing again.

The printing wouldn’t start and restarting Windows didn’t help it.

After doing some research on the internet about the error message, it came to an easy fix. All you need to do is to remove all the files inside the spool/printer folder on the server. If you are sharing your printers from a Win XP or Win 2003 Server, then you can find that folder in here:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS

You should see a lot of .SPL files in there. You need to remove all of them to get your Windows 98 machines printing again.