Patent 7508532 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on March, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method, medium, and computer-program product are provided to isolate (sandbox) printer drivers from other systems. A print processor and printer driver are moved into a separate process. A spooler communicates with the print processor through a shim, proxy, and stub. A component activation manager (CAM) maintains a database of the printer drives installed on a computer system. A component activation interface (CAI) facilitates startup and shutdown of the sandbox process.