splwow64.exe causes RDP Sessions to Hang After Closing Application

[Guest vsoares]

Hi!

 

I have several users connected through terminal services to a windows server

2003 64 bit. When a user sends some document to printer and tries to close

session it hangs for several minutes.

 

After searching, i found some articles

(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923357/en-us) pointing this issue. This

occurs because there is a process (Splwow64.exe) that remains in memory for

several minutes. This process is used to convert between 32 bit and 64 bit

applications. This process remains in memory in order to increase system

performance and unloads from memory after a specified time from the end of

the last job. We can specify this time adding or editing the registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\SplWOW64TimeOut

(DWORD) and setting here the number of minutes to stay in memory before

unloading.

 

Although this can be good for performance, it causes RDP sessions to hang

when short time has passed after the user has done his last print and tries

to close the session. The minimum value we can set SplWOW64TimeOut is 1. If

we set it to 0, the application just hangs completely.

Is there any way to set this process to unload as soon as the job ends?