USB ports stop recognizing printers

[Tom]

Client has a HP 6110xi printer that worker perfectly for over a year
connected to a Dell running XP Pro with all updates. He calls and says he
can't print. The printer status says "Offline". I used the HP utility to
remove the drivers and deleted all the USB ports in device manager and
rebooted. USB ports correctly reinstall. I started to reinstall the latest
driver from HP. I plugged in the USB cable when prompted and never got the
USB connection. I tried to install a different printer and had the same
issue. It was like I never plugged in the USB cable. I also tried different
USB ports. The USB ports would work for everything else, USB portable
drives, camera, IPAQ pocket PC. I took the HP 6110xi and USB cable to a
different PC and it installed perfectly. As a last resort, I restored an
image I had made when I reloaded the PC a year ago. I went to the HP 6110xi
and a test page printed perfectly.



Since no other software or hardware has been installed, my thinking is that
a file is getting corrupted or deleted since an image restore solved the
problem. And since the printer works perfectly after the image restore, it's
not a hardware problem. Talking to HP, they said that Dell's do not have
enough voltage to run the HP 6110 but couldn't explain why it worked for a
year and an image restore solved the problem.



Anyone had any ideas on this one?



Thanks,



Tom

 

[Chuck]

There is a possibility that one of microsofts updates caused the problem.
They tighted up the windows USB drivers to more closely conform to the
standards.

 

[Tom]

After the system restore, I did the year of updates and recreated the image
file. The printer worked perfectly for about 3 weeks until the exact same
problem occured again. I once again restored the updated image and it
started working. This one has me stumped.

 

[Tom]

The CPU was at 99% Idle. There were 10 documents in the queue. I stopped and
started the spooler service but no luck. The PC just lost communucation with
the printer. Research mentioned a file called usbprint.sys. If it happens
again, I'll restore that one file and see if that restores USB/printer
communication.