A job stuck showing "Deleting..." forever, or an error saying the printer is "in use" when nothing is actually printing, is almost always the print spooler service holding onto a stuck state — not a real conflict with another job or user.
The print spooler is the background service that manages every job sent to a printer. When a job fails partway — because the printer lost connection, ran out of paper, or was turned off mid-job — the spooler can get stuck trying to cancel or process something that no longer exists in a normal state, and a standard "cancel" click just doesn't take effect. The printer itself is almost never actually the problem here.
Search "Services" in the Start menu and open it. Find Print Spooler in the list, right-click it, and select Stop. With it stopped, open File Explorer and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\spool\PRINTERS, and delete any files inside that folder (these are the stuck job files themselves). Then go back to Services, right-click Print Spooler again, and select Start. This combination — stopping the service, clearing the stuck files, restarting the service — clears stuck jobs far more reliably than cancelling through the normal print queue window.
Open System Settings → Printers & Scanners. Right-click (or Control-click) anywhere in the empty space of the printer list and select Reset printing system if that option appears. This removes all configured printers and clears any stuck internal queue state — you'll need to re-add your printer afterward, but it's the most reliable way to clear a genuinely stuck job on Mac when simply removing the individual job doesn't work.
Before resorting to a full printing system reset, try removing just the affected printer (click it, then the minus button) and re-adding it — this often clears a stuck job without needing the more drastic reset option, and is worth trying first since it doesn't require reconfiguring every printer you have set up.
Restart your computer after clearing the stuck job — some spooler states don't fully release until a restart, even after the queue itself appears empty. If the message returns immediately with a fresh print attempt, check that the printer isn't genuinely showing an error on its own display (like a paper jam or open cover) that's legitimately blocking new jobs, since that would look similar from the computer's side.
A dropped Wi-Fi connection is the most common root cause of recurring stuck jobs.
See the "offline" troubleshooting guideWindows and Mac steps to force-clear a jammed queue.
Read the article →The most common reasons, in order of likelihood.
Read the article →The full clean-removal process on Windows and Mac.
Read the article →