Hm. That shouldn't be a problem, normally. If I had to guess I would say the
printer driver trashed some data in the registry when the process was
terminated (was it printing at the time ?) and pukes upon reading that data.
Follow the instructions to clean out printer drivers as they are posted in
the FAQ (and requoted below) and you should be fine.
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b. open the Printers and Faxes folder
c. right click on the printer and select "Delete"
d. after the printer is deleted, click File, Server Properties
e. select the Drivers tab
f. select the driver that is causing the problem and click Remove
g. if you don't know which printer driver is causing the problem, repeat
step 6 for all of the drivers
Now you're ready to add the printer(s) again making sure to use only Windows
XP compliant driver.
Here's the hard way:
Check in Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs; if there is an entry relating
to one of the printers, select it, then click Change/Remove. Follow the
dialog and "uninstall all" or "remove all" as appropriate. Some "printer
software" has programs that show up here and it will be a good idea to
remove those before going any further.
If the Print Spooler service is operational:
a. Open the Printers (Printers and Faxes on Windows XP) folder
b. delete all of the printers
c. click File, Server Properties
d. select the Drivers tab
e. for each entry:
f. select the entry
g. click Remove
Usually, this will do a pretty good job of cleaning out drivers with Windows
2000 and later (not so with Windows NT 4).
If the Print Spooler service is not operational, or you want to make certain
there are no printer driver remnants:
Warning! Be very careful using regedit - if you delete the wrong things, you
may render your computer inoperative!
a. open regedit (e.g. click Start, type regedit and press Enter)
b. navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Environments\Windo
ws NT x86\Drivers
i. under this key, there will be the keys Version-2 and Version-3 (one or
the other of these may be absent - not a problem)
ii. the sub-keys under these contain the printer driver configuration
information
iii. delete all the sub-keys inside Version-2 and Version-3, but not these
keys themselves
c. open a Command Prompt window
d. key the commands
net stop spooler
net start spooler
e. open Windows Explorer
f. navigate to %systemroot%\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86 (%systemroot% is
usually Windows, but it might be winnt or something else; this is set when
the OS is installed).
g. inside w32x86, there will be folders with the names 2 and 3 (one or more
of these may be absent - not a problem)
delete all of the files and sub-folders in each of the 2 and 3 folders,
but not the folders themselves
inside w32x86, there may be other folders with names starting with
"hewlett_packard", "hphp" or something else; delete these folders also
h. restart the print spooler (see steps 8 and 9 above)
i. At this point, the system should be pretty well back to the way it was
before any printers were installed.
