How to fix “An error occurred when starting printer spooler.” when you start Muhimbi Dcocument Convertor Service?

The Muhimbi PDF Converter for SharePoint allows end-users to convert, split, merge and secure common document types such as MS-Word, InfoPath, MSG (email), AutoCAD, Excel, HTML, PowerPoint, Publisher, Visio, ODF, TIFF, JPG and PNG from within SharePoint using a friendly interface, custom Nintex and SharePoint Designer workflows or even a Web Service call. The product also comes with powerful watermarking and PDF merging engines.

One of the Muhimbi components is window service Document Convertor Service that will convert documents into different format such as PDF. During the installation for this component, you might run into one issue to this service will fail to start due to the following error – “An error occurred when starting printer spooler.” as in the following screen shot. When we try to manually start the Print Spooler service, we got error also.

Here is the reason and solution to fix the issue. The Muhimbi Document Convertor Service depends on the Print Spooler to convert document to different formats. If Print Spooler not started, Muhimbi Document Convertor Service will NOT start. As a result, the key to resolve this is to make sure start Print Spooler service. The root cause not be able to start the Print Spooler is the corrupted

registration information for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SYSTEM \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ Spooler. The value should ONLY contain value RPCSS. But you will see other values such as http is there.

You could manually remove other values and just leave RPCSS there. I would prefer to use the following command posted by David Vinod to resolve this issue.

Click Start, Run and type the following:

CMD /K SC CONFIG SPOOLER DEPEND= RPCSS

You should retsrat the phisical server after registry change. Now, you should be able to start Muhimbi Document Convertor Service and enjoy document conversion to PDF on SharePoint.