BitWare Causes Spoolsv.exe Program Error in Windows

You may receive the following error message when you boot your computer, try to use a printer, or start a program that interacts with a printer: The Spooler service then stops, but can be restarted. While the spooler is stopped, the following error message is generated:

This situation can occur if BitWare for Windows is installed. The current versions of BitWare are 3.30 and 7.0, which are not fully compatible with the versions of Windows that are listed in the "Applies to" section of this article. To check to see if BitWare is running, look for instances of Bwagent.exe or Bwprnmon.exe in Task Manager.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Uninstalling the BitWare software is the best course of action, but is not available for all versions.

If uninstalling is not available, you can delete all registry entries and drivers that refer to BitWare manually:

1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2. Locate references to BitWare in the following keys in the registry:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windows NT x86\Drivers\Version-2
   
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors
   
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers
3. On the Edit menu, click Delete for each BitWare subtree.
4. Quit Registry Editor.
5. Delete all BitWare drivers from the %SystemRoot%\System32\Spool\Drivers\W32x86 folder.
6. Restart Windows.

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For more information, please refer to the following Computer Associates Web site: