Tuesday, December 09, 2008

SSRS - Unable to load client print control

One of the customer sites I work at was suddenly unable to print SSRS reports any more. This issue was occurring for only a few of their client boxes, so this rules out the possibility that it might have been a server issue.

It turns out that SSRS uses an activex control to provide some enhanced printing options. Here's some more information on it (taken from the MSDN site):

The Microsoft ActiveX control, RSPrintClient, provides client-side printing for reports viewed in a browser. The control displays a custom print dialog box that supports features common to other print dialog boxes, including print preview, page selections for specifying specific pages and ranges, page margins, and orientation.

After some investigating it looks like a conflict with KB956391. More information on it here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956391

I'm guessing that this hot fix may have been pushed out by windows update, which explains it's sudden manifestation.

This is the proper way of fixing the issue; as explained in Brian Hartman's blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brianhartman/archive/2008/11/05/client-print-fails-to-load-after-microsoft-update-956391.aspx

Or alternatively just uninstall KB956391.

More useful discussions on the "Unable to load client print control" issue:

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=332145&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4006280&SiteID=17

http://wills-blog.com/?p=220

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showpost.aspx?postid=4006172&siteid=1&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=4

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