I recently came across an issue on a client PC where i could not set a printer to be the default. When I right-clicked the printer and chose the “Set as Default Printer” option, absolutely nothing happened. After researching the issue, I was able to manually make the printer the default by adding the following registry key:
Name: Device
Type: Reg_SZ (String Value)
Value: “printername, winspool, portname”
Location: HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWindows
In my case, the Windows key didnt exist under CurrentVersion and had to be created.