Second try ...

[Mike Faithfull]

This post didn't seem to make it to the Newsgroup first time around ...

I have a simple small home network with O/S ranging from W95 through W98,
W2000 to XP Home, Microsoft Client for Networks, File & Print Sharing and
ICS. XP machine provides the gateway for ICS and the W95 machine does the
printing and scanning, the W98 is application-specific, and the W2000 is an
occasional visitor (laptop). It has all worked fine for months, but in the
last couple of days, the W95-connected LaserJet occasionally - not every
time - fails to print from the XP machine, and the print window (on the XP
machine) says it's printing to the (correctly-named) printer at a location
called "Ne02". AFAIK 'Ne02' has never existed anywhere on my network.
During one 'failure incident' I was checking all the configuration
parameters, as you do, when the printer suddenly came to life and delivered
the requested print. Up to that point, neither the XP machine nor the W95
machine admitted to having any job in the print queue, but the single page
print job completed quickly when it *did* finally start, so that I had no
time to check again. The PCs are connected together via a simple slow 10meg
hub.

Anybody any ideas what this "Ne02" is or where it came from? Is my hitherto
very stable XP machine about to crash in a pile of parity bits? Should I be
taking some action to prevent a bigger problem occurring?

 

[Ken Wickes [MSFT]]

There is something vaguely familiar about Ne02, but I can't remember for the
life of me what it was. Do the machines have basic connectivity when you
have this problem?

 

[Mike Faithfull]

There is something vaguely familiar about Ne02, but I can't remember for the
life of me what it was. Do the machines have basic connectivity when you
have this problem?

Would appear so. To prove .. er, .. something .. I brought a third PC on
line and found I could print from that one without any problem, and printing
from the PC to which the printer was directly attached (the 'Workbench'
machine, see below) worked too. Since making my original post, I uncovered
a Registry entry that included the Ne02 reference, but I've just searched
for it again and it seems to have morphed to Ne01 instead. The printer is
still not working from this PC, but is ok from the others.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers contains the entry: DeviceOld REG_SZ
\\WORKBENCH\HP LJ IIIP\winspool,Ne01: "Workbench" is the name of the old
Win95 PC and the printer is .. well, you can guess, I expect! I have no
idea of the significance of the entry or why it's changed. The device IS
old - about 10 or 11 years I would guess - but clearly that's not what it
means!

 

[Ken Wickes [MSFT]]

Would appear so. To prove .. er, .. something .. I brought a third PC on
line and found I could print from that one without any problem, and printing
from the PC to which the printer was directly attached (the 'Workbench'
machine, see below) worked too. Since making my original post, I uncovered
a Registry entry that included the Ne02 reference, but I've just searched
for it again and it seems to have morphed to Ne01 instead. The printer is
still not working from this PC, but is ok from the others.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers contains the entry: DeviceOld REG_SZ
\\WORKBENCH\HP LJ IIIP\winspool,Ne01: "Workbench" is the name of the old
Win95 PC and the printer is .. well, you can guess, I expect! I have no
idea of the significance of the entry or why it's changed. The device IS
old - about 10 or 11 years I would guess - but clearly that's not what it
means!

Do you have more than one network printer installed?