Win2K Pro dies on print request

[Helen]

Apologies if this turns out long...
I have an annoying, sporadic and sometimes destructive
problem with printing locally from Win2k to my Okidata 8z.
As soon as the "Print" button in the print dialog is
clicked, the system shuts down (abends) and reboots. No
blue-screen, no message in the system log. On rebooting,
sometimes there is a scandisk on reboot, mostly not. If
Word was running at the time, there is no recovery.

This is Win2K SP 2 out of the box on an AMD-1300 with 1 Gb
RAM, with 2 pagsys files on separate drives more than
adequately configured for the RAM. Previously I had the
same problem on W2K when the system was lower-spec'd -
which indeed is partly why I decided I needed to upgrade.
The Okidata W2K driver is installed from the vendor CD.
Previous to that, I had NT 4 SP 6a for some years, and
never encountered this problem.

I've tried the SP3 for W2K, which didn't cure it. Have
since reinstalled W2K from disk and stuck with SP2 because
SP3 introduced problems with a bad MSVCP60 runtime that
broke Norton Security and some other non-MS apps.

Specific conditions where this has occurred are:

- printing from IE 5
- printing to Acrobat Distiller 4 (via the auto-installed
macro in Word 97 SR 2)
- after successfully printing to Distiller, taking the
option to print the PDF to the Okidata printer

This seems to suggest that the problem is in the OS, not
in the print routines of the various applications. Have
scoured the Kbase and can't find anything regarding it.

Thanks for your patience.
Helen

 

[Helen Borrie]

Helen -

I'd check your setting in Control Panel->System->Advanced-
checked under system failure. No solution by any means,
but if it is, uncheck it and see if you get a bluescreen
on the next such occurence - if you do it could help you
track down the error better.

Phil J

Thanks, Phil. "Silent crash" is such a bore. Now I can look forward
to blue screens, which I have missed so much since installing W2K.
I love BSOD so much that I have one as background on my RedHat GUI
desktop. Not that a coredump means a thing to me, but the colours go
nicely together, don't they?

In search of a solution, I decided to uninstall the Okipage 8z printer
driver and simply reinstall it. I did the uninstall and then
clean-booted, in order to get W2K to detect the printer via PnP.
Interesting: it correctly identified the printer, asked for the disk,
then proceeded to install the Windows 95/98 driver!

Ok. I began again and, this time, installed it myself via the Add
Printer dialog, forcing it to take the W2K driver. Now, it may be an
illusion, but I haven't had a "sudden death" now for about 30 hours.

I see this is quite a common problem with W2K. If it's not an illusion
but a solution, then it might be a strategy others could follow. It
might be deduced that the printer installation routine is just dumb
about matching up things from the inf file, where it has a choice of
driver versions.

regards,
Helen