Why the printers list is not enough
Removing a device in Settings under Bluetooth & devices, Printers & scanners deletes the printer object, but often leaves the driver and its package installed — Windows keeps them so the printer can come back without a download. The real inventory lives in Print Server Properties: from any printer window, select any printer, then Print Server Properties, Drivers tab — or just run printmanagement.msc. There you will see every driver every printer ever installed on this machine, including the ones for devices long gone.
The Drivers tab lists drivers; removing a driver and removing its package are two different operations. The driver is the installed copy under C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers; the package is the original in the Driver Store, which Windows can reinstall from at any time. Remove both, or the next Windows Update or printer discovery silently resurrects the entry.
- Settings, Bluetooth & devices, Printers & scanners — removes the queue, not the driver
- printmanagement.msc — full Print Management with custom filters
- Print Server Properties, Drivers tab — the actual driver list
- C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers — where installed drivers live
- pnputil /enum-drivers — driver packages in the Driver Store
- printui.dll /s /t2 — the old-school driver dialog, still works
Removing packages without breaking the spooler
Work in order: remove every printer queue that uses the driver first, or Windows will refuse with the driver-is-in-use message and you will be hunting processes instead of cleaning. In Print Management, pick the driver and click Remove Driver Package rather than Remove Driver Only when you want it gone for good — Remove Driver Only is exactly the resurrection scenario described above. Some packages need the Print Spooler service restarted before they disappear cleanly; stopping and starting it in Services takes seconds.
Type 4 drivers — the ones Windows installs automatically from Windows Update — sometimes refuse both removal buttons. The workaround is removing the printer, unplugging it, then deleting the driver after a reboot, or removing the package with pnputil /delete-driver, where the driver name comes from pnputil /enum-drivers. Do this as administrator, and skip anything you cannot positively identify: a driver with a name you recognize is a candidate; OEM40.inf is not.
When printing still misbehaves afterwards
A stuck queue is its own disease, separate from drivers: the spooler holds jobs in C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, and one corrupted job can block everything behind it. The fix is boring and reliable — stop the Print Spooler service, delete the files inside that folder, start the service again — and it clears nine out of ten ghost jobs without touching drivers at all.
If queues and drivers are clean but the same old devices keep coming back, the leftovers live outside the spooler: vendor tools, network deployment scripts, or orphaned folders a cleanup pass with Kleaner PRO catches because the dialogs never look there. After that, one printer, one driver, zero surprises — which is all a printing setup really needs to be.
Questions and Answers
Is it safe to delete files in the spool\PRINTERS folder?
Yes, with the Print Spooler service stopped first — those are queued jobs, and deleting them while it runs corrupts the queue state. Restart the service afterwards and printing returns to normal.
Why does Windows say the printer driver is in use?
Because a queue, a pending job or the spooler cache still references it. Remove the printers using it, clear stuck jobs, restart the spooler — then the driver removes without complaint.
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