Information on migrating printer settings in Microsoft UE-V

1. That all printer drivers are installed on all machines that a user will access
2. That the bitness (32 or 64) of the operating system will always be the same
3. That the printer is already installed on the local machine
4. That the user has access to the printer on the local machine
5. That you know the operating system of the local machine
6. That the name of the printer hasn't been modified for the local installation
7. If the device is unavailable, Windows will reset the default printer to one that is available on the next logon. Overwriting this key may prevent this from happening depending on the timing of the write.
8. Terminal Servers have their own default printer settings
9. Location-aware default printer settings (per-network default printer settings) may be overwritten
10. Smart Default Printer setting is a separate registry value that affects the default printer setting when a new print queue is defined. Overwriting the Devices values may interfere with this setting as well.

With all of these limitations in mind, there are better technologies for migrating printer settings:

Local printers should be backed up and restored using PrintBRM - http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2009/10/09/windows-7-windows-server-2008-r2-printbrm.aspx

Printer settings migration is covered by USMT - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd560792(v=WS.10).aspx (Network printer mappings)

Restoring the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Devices key from one machine to another is an untested solution, and our best guidance at this point is not to use this method for migrating printer settings.