Haunted printers turning on by themselves and printing nonsense has to be one of my favorite Windows 11 bugs ever

Word to the wise, you might want to avoid Windows 11 23H2 update KB5050092 (Microsoft sure knows how to name ’em!) for now. Turns out, it can cause USB printers to start spouting pages with random gibberish, sorry “unusual characters”. Obviously, if you’re into the idea of a printergeist animating itself at 3am and graunching away on its ink supply, then maybe you might want to actively seek out the update

This is, it seems, the isolated observation of a loan Redditor or whatever, but the official stance of Microsoft itself as posted on its “Learn” website for logging known issues with Windows.

In an update titled, “USB printers might print random text with the January 2025 preview update,” Microsoft says, “you might observe issues with USB connected dual-mode printers that support both USB Print and IPP Over USB protocols,” after installing the KB5050092 update for Windows 11 23H2 builds.

Microsoft goes on to explain, “you might observe that the printer unexpectedly prints random text and data, including network commands and unusual characters.”

It also says that, “the issue is observed when the printer driver is installed on the Windows device, and the print spooler sends IPP protocol messages to the printer, causing it to print unexpected text.” So now you know!

Apparently, you’ll be able to identify if you have this specific issue if the page the printer spits out starts with the header, “POST /ipp/print HTTP/1.1.” The solution? Rolling back the update in a process Microsoft calls Known Issue Rollback (KIR).Microsoft provides links for tools to do just that on the Learn page.

As it happens, even the most perfunctory Google search throws up plenty of examples of similar issues in recent years. Indeed, some include Windows users posting online about random printing problems with the signature “POST /ipp/print HTTP/1.1.” header text that predate the KB5050092.

So, you know, this probably isn’t the last we’ll hear of Windows getting unexpectedly chatty with USB printers. But if it happens to you, at least you’ll know where to start with getting the problem fixed, and not be concerned that you’re in the opening scene of a low budget sci-fi horror flick.