Why is the Current Printer unavailable in Office

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Whenever I try to print any document from Microsoft Office 2007 in Windows Vista 64-bit there is a great possibility that the print job will fail with the following error message:

Current printer is unavailable.
Select another printer.

Only problem is no printer works, not even Bullzip PDF Printer.

The only way to resolve this that I have found so far is a reboot, but I don't want to do that all the time.

I am using Windows Vista 64-bit. I've had the problem using both SP1 and SP2. The problem occurs on both locally installed and network printers, as well as the virtual printer Bullzip PDF Printer. My primary source of the problem has been Excel, but the error has also occurred in Word.

Changing the default printer and restarting the Microsoft Office-application solves this temporarily, but not permanently. Google:ing the error message returns a lot of questions but no solutions, so seems like a frequent problem.

What could be a permanent solution for this problem?

UPDATE:
It seems that my problem stems from me opening MS Office applications by opening a document from Total Commander with administrative rights. This somehow makes the applications not find the printers. Opening MS Office applications either from the Start menu or by opening a document in a non-administrator Explorer allows me to print.

Best Answer

According to Microsoft's You receive an error message if you try to print a document:

This problem occurs because you do not have the permissions that are required to create or re-create a parsed binary printer description file (.bud).

Note The .bud file is a binary version of the generic printer description file (.gpd) that is included with many printer drivers. Additionally, the .bud file is located in the Windows\System32\Spooler\Drivers\W32x86\3 folder.

The problem that is described in this article does not occur if you have the correct permissions to the Windows\System32\Spooler\Drivers\W32x86\3 folder. The problem does not occur because the .bud file is successfully re-created the next time that the user uses the printer.

Please note that the above directory for the .bud file may be different on your x64 machine.

Evidently, Total Commander launches the document under a very restrained account. You may either give this account permission to modify the above directory, or do not launch documents from Total Commander, or use another explorer than Total Commander.

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