Results Title | Virtual Desktop Printing Case Study

When the Print Driver Is the Thing Breaking Your Virtual Desktops

Virtual desktop environments concentrate risk in a way physical machines do not. A print driver that misbehaves on one laptop is an annoyance. The same driver loaded into a virtual desktop can take the print spooler down with it, and every printer a user relies on disappears until the service comes back. The usual fix is to manage drivers more carefully, but the other option is to stop putting them on the virtual desktop at all.

The Challenge

Results Title ran a Windows print server and deployed printers to users through Group Policy, and across 26 offices and roughly 65 people who print, the setup worked until the drivers did not.

The failure traced back to a single device. "Our main copier's print driver was crashing our virtual desktops' print spooler," says Grant Beery, IT Manager at Results Title. "This caused print jobs to fail, and printer list to disappear until the spooler recovered."

For a title company, that timing matters. Closing documents get printed against appointments that are already on the calendar, and a spooler that drops the printer list mid-session interrupts work that cannot easily be rescheduled.

Beery evaluated alternatives, and the architecture is what ruled one of them out. "We looked at PrinterLogic but we still needed to have the print drivers installed on the virtual desktop, which wouldn't have fixed our issue," he says.

"Not having to have the drivers installed on the virtual desktops was exactly what we needed."

Grant Beery

IT Manager,
Results Title

The Solution

ezeep prints without installing drivers on the endpoint, which removed the component that had been crashing the spooler. The virtual desktops no longer load the copier driver at all, so the failure mode that had been interrupting closings no longer has anything to trigger it.

Beery stood up a virtual machine in the company's existing Azure environment and re-added the printers there, then configured ezeep on top. User and group provisioning came straight from the directory they already run. "Setup for the actual product setup was quick and very easy to import users and groups through Entra," he says.

Printers now reach users across all 26 offices from one place, through virtual desktops rather than work around them, with directory-based assignment replacing per-user Group Policy work.

The Outcome

The print failures resolved at the point of switching. Every user who moved onto ezeep had their printing issues clear immediately, across all 26 offices. Printers stopped disappearing from users' lists, and jobs stopped failing partway through. Beery puts return on investment in the one to three month range.

The operational gain he points to is the provisioning itself. Getting printers in front of every user without touching each account individually is, in his assessment, worth the cost of the product on its own.

Why It Matters

Results Title represents a failure mode specific to virtual desktop environments: a single vendor's print driver destabilizing the print spooler for everyone on the host, with no realistic way to fix it while the driver has to be installed. Print management platforms that deliver drivers to the endpoint cannot resolve this, because the driver is the problem. For IT teams running Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, or any VDI estate where spooler crashes trace back to a specific device driver, this case study is a concrete example of removing the driver rather than managing it.

About Results Title

Results Title provides land title and real estate settlement services across Minnesota and western Wisconsin, operating 26 closing offices from Minneapolis and St. Paul out to Duluth, Rochester, St. Cloud, and Hudson and Superior in Wisconsin. The company works alongside RE/MAX Results and Results Home Mortgage. Around 65 people print across those offices from virtual desktops, using ezeep so that no print drivers need to be installed on the desktops themselves.

Visit their website →