Print Server CPU spikes on reboot -- Spoolsv.exe

Solution

Problem in my case turned out to be a bad driver. Luckily it was a driver from an old printer that was no longer on the network.

Cleaning out print drivers is pretty easy: Open up two instances of print manager, go to the Drivers menu on one, and the printers on the other. Arrange the columns on the printers page so that you can see the printer name and the driver name. Sort by driver name, then compare the list to the ones in the Drivers menu. This makes it easy to see which drivers are no longer in use.

If you've cleaned out old drivers, and the problem is still occurring, you may need to start removing printers until the problem stops. Remove a printer, reboot the server, and see if the problem still exists. Of course, make sure you copy the printer information so you can re-add it later. Once you've determined which printer/driver combo is causing the issue, see if you can find an alternative driver for that printer. Most printer manufacturers recommend using their "Universal Print Driver" in a print server environment, rather than the 'named' or 'model specific' driver.

 Problem

In brief, our print server would hang with 100% CPU usage whenever it was rebooted. This necessitated spoolsv.exe (the 100% process) to be manually terminated, and the spooler and all dependant services to be restarted. After manual termination/restart, the CPU levels would remain normal. Printer shares would be unavailable during the CPU spike.

Machine Specs:

• Server 2008 R2 -- fully updated
• VM on top of XenServer 6.2 - Intel based system
• 2 core
• 3 GB of RAM
• Additional Printer Related Software
• Print Manager (print tracking software)
• Citrix Universal Print Server

Things I tried that didn't help

• Windows updates
• Updating paravirtualization driver.
• SFC / Checkdisk/ other system file scans
• Re-installing drivers/print queues  

Problem ended up being an issue with some unused print driver. Apparently the spooler service loads up drivers even if they are not being used by any print queue. So the only way to fix the problem was to remove all drivers from printers that had been retired -- see details in Solution above.