I received a call from a customer today who was suddenly unable to print to Epson Dot Matrix printers, after a LOT of troubleshooting I figured out that this is due to a Windows update.
Printers I can confirm that are not working after the updates are:
- Epson LQ-300
- Epson LQ-300+ II
- Epson LQ310
- Epson LX300
- Epson LQ2180
- Epson LQ2190
- Epson LQ730K
Windows Updates have been issued for Windows 7, 8 and 10 and they are all having the same issue. The updates are:
There may be other updates which I am not aware of yet.
To get your printers working again, the quickest way is to remove the offending update. As you might not be sure which update you have installed. The quickest way is to run the following commands in an elevated command prompt:
wusa /uninstall /kb:4048952 /quiet /warnrestart wusa /uninstall /kb:4048953 /quiet /warnrestart wusa /uninstall /kb:4048954 /quiet /warnrestart wusa /uninstall /kb:4048955 /quiet /warnrestart wusa /uninstall /kb:4048957 /quiet /warnrestart wusa /uninstall /kb:4048958 /quiet /warnrestart
Until Microsoft release an updated security patch you can temporarily block the patch using this tool from Microsoft:
Or if you are using WSUS then you can block the patch from there. This is really a difficult problem to resolve if you don’t realise that the problem is being caused by an update, because you would’t expect an old Dot Matrix printer that has been working fine for years to be impacted by a Microsoft Security Roll-up.
I don’t know if this is happening to other Dot Matrix Printers besides Epson at the moment.
Microsoft have updated the KB articles to acknowledge that these updates are the cause of the problem:
Update 21/11/2017 – Problem has been fixed by Microsoft
Microsoft have now issued an updated patch which will should download automatically via Windows Update, but if you want to grab it manually it can be found here:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4055038/november-21-2017-kb4055038