The Latest Printer Headache Caused By A Windows Update Is A Doozy

After numberous printing related bugs this year, you'd think Microsoft would be particuarly cautious and do some additional Q&A on its latest printing-related patches, but that doesn't appear to be the case. A newly discovered bug affecting Windows 10 and 11 seems to be renaming all printers on a system “HP M101-M106”.

At the turn of the month, it seemed that the HP Smart app was being installed on users’ devices, whether or not they had an HP printer, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. After a recent Windows Update, that has since been pulled, a variety of printers were relabeled on Windows 10 and 11 devices, causing unwanted annoyances.


The folks over at Windows Latest postulate that this is some sort of metadata mix-up, where HP shipped some malformed or bad printer information used to identify its printers. If you happen to have been affected by this bug, you might notice the icon and printer brand in the Control Panel’s Devices and Printers menu have changed. Thankfully, this error does not affect functionality, so it is more just a silly annoyance than anything.

If this bug happens to bug you too much, you probably don’t have many options, as it would seem the fix is to reset Windows. That is a bit overkill, given that this is only realistically a visual bug and will likely be fixed by an update from Windows in the coming days. We will have to see what happens, though; perhaps an update will make it worse, which would add to the amusing calamity.