Win2000 Printing Nightare

  • Thread starter Thread starter roback
  • Start date Start date
R

roback

Upon startup, gibberish comes out of the printer, and upon printing any
document, gibberish comes out.I dumped my drivers both from within the
control panel and in the registry. I uplugged the printer, turned off
the spooler service, and shut down / rebooted computer. I then turned
printer on, reconnected cable and restarted the computer. This all
started from within a visual basic app, when I went to print a form
without indicating a date range on the form. It is a billing program. I
am at a loss. Any additional info would be appreciated.
 
Upon startup, gibberish comes out of the printer, and upon printing any
document, gibberish comes out.I dumped my drivers both from within the
control panel and in the registry. I uplugged the printer, turned off
the spooler service, and shut down / rebooted computer. I then turned
printer on, reconnected cable and restarted the computer. This all
started from within a visual basic app, when I went to print a form
without indicating a date range on the form. It is a billing program. I
am at a loss. Any additional info would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Removing the printer drivers, turning off the spooler service
or rebooting the machine won't help you. You need to clear
the printer queue, either by deleting all print jobs via the
control panel or by running this batch file:

@echo off
echo.
echo Purging the print queue . . .
net stop Spooler
echo Deleting all print jobs . . .
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
del /q %SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start Spooler
echo Done!
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
 
Upon startup, gibberish comes out of the printer, and upon printing any
document, gibberish comes out.I dumped my drivers both from within the
control panel and in the registry. I uplugged the printer, turned off
the spooler service, and shut down / rebooted computer. I then turned
printer on, reconnected cable and restarted the computer. This all
started from within a visual basic app, when I went to print a form
without indicating a date range on the form. It is a billing program. I
am at a loss. Any additional info would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

You posted the same question to another group this morning,
microsoft.com:119/microsoft.public.win2000.new_user , maybe you lost
your way back to that group? I gave you this answer:

Purge the print spooler, to do so at a command prompt issue the
following commands, pressing enter after each line:

NET STOP SPOOLER
cd %systemroot%\SYSTEM32\spool\PRINTERS
del *.spl
del *.shd
NET START SPOOLER

That will delete ALL the print jobs.

You can make a small batch file to do the above job, MVP Pegasus
freguently posts this little batch file to do the job:

@echo off
echo.
echo Purging the print queue . . .
net stop Spooler
echo Deleting all print jobs . . .
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
del /q %SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start Spooler
echo Done!
ping localhost -n 4 > nul

Adding the ping commands gives the service a bit of additional time to
be stopped and started.

Did you try this?

John
 
John John said:
You posted the same question to another group this morning,
microsoft.com:119/microsoft.public.win2000.new_user , maybe you lost your
way back to that group? I gave you this answer:

Purge the print spooler, to do so at a command prompt issue the following
commands, pressing enter after each line:

NET STOP SPOOLER
cd %systemroot%\SYSTEM32\spool\PRINTERS
del *.spl
del *.shd
NET START SPOOLER

That will delete ALL the print jobs.

You can make a small batch file to do the above job, MVP Pegasus
freguently posts this little batch file to do the job:

@echo off
echo.
echo Purging the print queue . . .
net stop Spooler
echo Deleting all print jobs . . .
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
del /q %SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start Spooler
echo Done!
ping localhost -n 4 > nul

Adding the ping commands gives the service a bit of additional time to be
stopped and started.

Did you try this?

John
Click to expand...

I wouldn't have replied if I had known that the
OP engages in multi-posting. Your earlier reply
would have fixed his problem straight away.
 
Pegasus \(MVP\) said:
I wouldn't have replied if I had known that the
OP engages in multi-posting. Your earlier reply
would have fixed his problem straight away.
Click to expand...

Hi John,

i am so sorry. I am in a difficult situation, and did not realize that
many such as you frequent several usenet groups. I can see that this
has been confusing. I will limit my conversations with you here. I
did run the preceeding batch file from the command line, with no
success, as well as the NET STOP SPOOLER commands. I got a replay that
said that the *.spl and *.shd paths could not be found? I suspect this
means that they were already deleted. Wierd thing is that when I go to
reinstall the driver, it says it still exists and I think I have done
everything. Apparently not. The other wierd thing is that the computer
does not auto detect any printers I have connected, even as printers???
Any help would be appreciated. I guess I could reinstall the OS as I
only use the computer for this one program, but I don't really know what
I am doing on the PC side. I do not know if installing will wipe
everything, so that the current problem goes away! The only thing I have
not done is connected the printer to another computer as this is not
accessible to me. But I did run a self-test on it which does fine. The
only remote possibility is a problem with the interface connection on
the printer? But why the OS has difficulty recognizing printers
suggested that it is an OS and not printer problem. Thanks for all of
your help. I have what amounts to level 4 tech support knowledge on the
Mac side, but on the PC side, I am an abject dufus! If you can be of
any further help, please please do so.
 
Hi John,

i am so sorry. I am in a difficult situation, and did not realize that
many such as you frequent several usenet groups. I can see that this
has been confusing. I will limit my conversations with you here. I
did run the preceeding batch file from the command line, with no
success, as well as the NET STOP SPOOLER commands. I got a replay that
said that the *.spl and *.shd paths could not be found? I suspect this
means that they were already deleted. Wierd thing is that when I go to
reinstall the driver, it says it still exists and I think I have done
everything. Apparently not. The other wierd thing is that the computer
does not auto detect any printers I have connected, even as printers???
Any help would be appreciated. I guess I could reinstall the OS as I
only use the computer for this one program, but I don't really know what
I am doing on the PC side. I do not know if installing will wipe
everything, so that the current problem goes away! The only thing I have
not done is connected the printer to another computer as this is not
accessible to me. But I did run a self-test on it which does fine. The
only remote possibility is a problem with the interface connection on
the printer? But why the OS has difficulty recognizing printers
suggested that it is an OS and not printer problem. Thanks for all of
your help. I have what amounts to level 4 tech support knowledge on the
Mac side, but on the PC side, I am an abject dufus! If you can be of
any further help, please please do so.
Click to expand...

There are two issues here: The one about multi-posting and the
one about printing. Let's deal with multi-posting first.

Assume that there are three newsgroups called A, B and C.
Let's have three contributors: Alf replies to questions in group A,
Bob deals with problems posted in B and Charlie answers
questions in C. Now along comes Roback, posting his question
independently in each of the three groups. Alf, Bob and Charlie
are in a helpful mood so they all sit down and spend time answering
Roback's question. Alf can't see what Bob or Charlie have written
and vice versa, so they all spend time solving your problem. They
all re-invent the wheel. What a waste of time!

This is what happens when you multipost. It's a bad habit that
gets you very unpopular with respondents, for obvious reasons.
However, if you had crossposted your question then Alf, Bob and
Charlie would see the replies from the other groups. They might
let it go or they might make further contributions. This is why
multiposting is bad and crossposting is good (if used in moderation) -
see here: http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/mul_crss.htm

Now about your printing problem: If you run this batch file

@echo off
echo.
echo Purging the print queue . . .
net stop Spooler
echo Deleting all print jobs . . .
ping localhost -n 4 > nul
del /q %SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers\*.*
net start Spooler
echo Done!
ping localhost -n 4 > nul

and if it reports "file not found" then there is something wrong
with your folder structure, i.e. the folder
%SystemRoot%\system32\spool\printers
does not exist. You need to explore this further: Using
Windows Explorer, follow the full path shown above and see
how far you get. If you get into the "printers" subfolder, find
out what files are there. If there are some, stop the Spooler
service and delete these files.

In other words, you need to do manually what the batch file
does automatically. In this way you can find out exactly what's
going on and at which stage the process fails.
 
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