Microsoft's Patch Tuesday Strikes Again With A Bizarre Printer Bug

If your office printer has suddenly gone on strike after this week's updates, you aren't alone, and the culprit is surprisingly strange. Microsoft's latest round of security updates has introduced a rather eccentric quirk to the Windows printing stack. Following the rollout of the November 2026 security patches, users across a wide array of client and server operating systems, including Windows 11, Windows 10, and various Windows Server iterations, have run into a wall when trying to print specific documents.

The common denominator is zero-dimension images. According to Microsoft's official support documentation, document printing may completely fail via the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) if the file contains images rendered with a height or width value of zero at the selected print resolution.

At first glance, the bug sounds easy enough to avoid; just don't put weird invisible zero-width or zero-height images in your documents, right? But obviously, users almost never insert these intentionally. Instead, they sneak into files automatically in a few ways: automated document or invoice generators, web scraping, copy-pasting, and ancient corporate letterhead are all potential culprits.

A key to understanding this is that the image itself doesn't have to be literally zero pixels in the document, but rather it shows up that way in the rendered output. Images used for narrow spacers or dividers are the most likely to be problematic here; insufficient print DPI could easily leave such a narrow image at a zero-pixel width. Because these elements are entirely invisible in a print preview on a standard monitor, a user can look right at a document that appears totally clean, hit print, and watch the print spooler choke instantly.

Microsoft has officially acknowledged the bug and marked it under investigation, but an out-of-band patch or official fix has not yet landed at the time of writing. Until Microsoft rolls out a proper fix, affected workflows either require manually scrubbing phantom shapes from documents or waiting out the inevitable follow-up patch.

_{Shout out to BleepingComputer for pointing out this issue.}