Problem with Installing and Configuring MS Server 2012 Essentials trial and MS Server 2012 Standard trial

Question

My name is John Grace.  I have been an MS customer for years.  Never before in my experiences with MS up to this point have I experienced such POOR product support.  Your pre-sales agents have no knowledge to offer with pre-sales config or
install issues, your support personnel are trained not to provide any reasonable help with even minor questions and concerns helping to make sure your trial experiences are progress and successful, your product support Mgrs show lack luster concern if you
need some technical direction.  The first thing that is asked is do you have a support contract or credit card for this session.  Now, if I am evaluating products a support contract should not be necessary as you should want customers to have good
outcomes with their trials.
I have been trying to configure test servers with the above mentioned products for the past 6 days with no success.  Each install is different and the configurations some times work and some times they don't.  I reach out for help in your forums,
etc., and am still at square one.
This frustrating and breeds a lack of confidence in your organization.  When Bill Gates was in charge I experienced none of the nonsense today. 
I have identified bugs and issues to your product teams and they gladly accept these.  But when help is needed...it is send us an email type attitude.  I have 8 8 core servers running  windows 2008 server R2 slated for upgrading to windows
2012 server, and more after that.  If I don't get the trial software to work, the upgrades are terminated.
Please give me some help or you will loose me as a customer, and customers that I installed systems for.
John Grace
[phone]
John Grace

Answer 1

Hi again Alan,
Thanks for the reply, i have however not been able to find any viable hotfix from MS addressing this problem so far. I only found the QFE for 2008 R2, but this is not applicable in my enviroment.
Sadly, we are experiencing the same issue with the 2008 R2 server as print server now. So the problem seems to be with the 2012 R2 RDS servers.
We have been able to narrow it down to a probable cause though:
The issue seems to be the cause of Client Side Rendering, even if it is disabled on the shared printers. We are seeing heavy bloating in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider
The same printers are listed multiple times in subkeys for each user-SID.
The print server is listed twice under the 'Servers' key, once with just the hostname and once with the fqdn. Benath these two many of the printers are also listed multiple times.
Consequences are that printers are showing as clones for the users and they cannot set them as default printer. If they remove the printer manually, it just reappears. Setting a delete on the shared printer through GPP does not work either.
The only manual workaround we have found working is to delete the entire "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Print\Providers\Client Side Rendering Print Provider" key on the
terminal server in question, and then restart the print spooler. This fixes the problem for the user, but once they start logging off and on again, the bloating of the registry is at it once more - and the problems following with it.
In an enviroment with 70+ printers and 15 RDS servers, spread on 3 different farms, it's not a good solution though.
Any ideas?