Tech Fix: Windows cannot connect to the printer. Access is denied
So, a while back I had a strange problem. I had meant to write about it before now, but life has been kind of strange & busy. Anyway, I had a business with split Vista & XP machines, most of which are laptops. The main machine that stays put is a Windows XP desktop and they wanted to add a printer to it that everyone else could connect to and use. However, it was giving an annoying error of "Windows cannot connect to the printer. Access is denied" regardless of what I did on the Windows XP machine. It all led back to that one machine as with the printer on one of the Vista laptops, the printing worked fine (but having a printer hooked up to a mobile laptop isn't really helpful). Continue for the solution that I stumbled upon after a while of beating my head on the desk...
1. Restart the computer that will be connected to the printer and bring up the Windows boot menu (Press F8 to bring up the menu as soon as the computer starts rebooting, if you get the usual Windows loading screen, you've missed your chance)
2. Select "Safe Mode with Networking" and press enter
3. Login as Administrator
4. Click Start Menu, Accessories, Windows Explorer
5. Select the drive with Windows XP (By default, this will be C:)
6. Double-click Windows (If you receive a "These Files are hidden" message, click Show the contents of this folder to view the contents of the folder)
7. Double-click System32
8. Right-click Spool and then click Properties
9. On the Security tab click Advanced
10. On the Permissions tab click Add, then click Advanced.
11. In the Select User or Group click Find Now, choose Network, click OK, click OK on more time.
12. In the Apply onto list click This Folder, sub folders and files.
13. In the Permissions list locate Full Control, click to select the Allow check box, and then click OK
14. In the Advanced Security Settings for spool dialog box click Apply, and then click OK .
15. In the Spool Properties dialog box click OK
16. Restart the computer and let it do a normal boot
17. Add the shared printer to the Windows Vista-based computer.
18. Curse Microsoft for making you do all the previous steps
You are done now and everything (should) be working as intended. It did for me anyway.
I originally found the instructions above at this link and cleaned them up a bit.