Can't Open Printers and Faxes applet?

[ajharn]

Running WinXP Pro SP2. Have been struggling to get a new printer to work properly and have installed and uninstalled the driver several times.

Suddenly, I no longer can access the Printers and Faxes applet. When I launch it, I get an hourglass for a few seconds, then it goes away.

Please let me know what details to provide.

Thanks,
AJ

 

[bcastner]

Start, Run, CMD
net start spooler
exit

Try again.

 

[micker377]

What printer?

 

[ajharn]

Thanks for replying Gents.

I'm going to restart this discussion in the morning. But here's the shimmy.

First off. The printer applet problem was related to two hung services in the background. bcastner, I had checked the spooler and it was running & I stopped and restarted it as well, to no avail.

When I went to reboot however, I got a Not Responding error on the "DDE Server Window", and one other service that I've now forgotten and didn't write down. I was too busy steaming, sorry.

After that reboot, The applet loaded.

In the meantime, I'm still locked in battle with the printer. A Konica-Minolta 2300W color laser. Great deal, these monsters, but wildly unruly. I wish I had spent the lousy extra $100 for the one with the built-in print server.

I'm having problems with it conflicting with a Windows Printer Share elsewhere on the network. The 2300W is local to the Machine (XP Pro SP2) on LPT1. The Printer Share was connected to as a network printer (\\server\share\) without capturing LPT1. Now, even when I delete the network printer from the local machine's printer applet and attempt to print from an application to my locally attached 2300W...the data gets captured and sent to the old Printer Share (wrong format, wrong driver -- hundreds of pages of garbage)

Plus, when I delete shared printer on the local machine, it tends to come back automatically when XP chooses to browse the network.

Anyhoo, was frustrated and jumped the gun earlier. Any further advice would be appreciated. Have been through a lot of tweaks and KnowledgeBase mining on this one.

Thanks,
AJ

 

[bcastner]

In the logon script place at the top:

net use * /delete /y
net use /Persistent:No

This should prevent any leftover mappings from having an effect on the local printer definition.

You could, after logon, Control Panel, Folder Options, View, and uncheck 'automaticly search for network folders and printers.' to prevent network shares from automaticly populating.

 

[ajharn]

Thanks,

The printer has been running properly all morning. Can't really say why. The missing link in the story is that I upgraded the PC to SP2 yesterday because Konica-Minolta said I wouldn't be able to share the printer if the host wasn't SP2.

I had been meaning to get rid of the automatic network browsing. Thanks for the reminder, bcastner.

Not sure what fixed it, but grateful to you both for input.

-AJ

P.S. Now I have to deal with it on the network. Wish me luck.