Remove Phantom Printers from Server 2016

When you log in as an administrator, you might find a network printers that can’t be removed between reboots. The appear in the “Printers & scanners” list, but not in Control Panel’s list of printers nor the Print Management console. The giveaway is that you would see manage it as a local printer, like below. You don’t have the option to remove it:

If you check the hardware properties, you see a user SID:

To cleanly remove the printer, remove the following registry keys. Note that the keys are associated with the SID in the “Location” field shown above.

HKLM\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider\<User_SID>

HKLM\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider\Servers\<PrintServerName> where the Client Side Port\<GUID>\PrinterPath  matches the location field above.

You will now have the ability to remove the printer from the Settings page.

Reboot the server to validate that it has been removed.