windows 2000/ officejet usb printer driver causing problems

[Brett]

I just built my grandparents a new computer, and convinced them to
shell out $150 for an oem of win2k sp4 instead of XP. They are still
using their officejet v40 that worked with windows ME. Windows
installed fine, all windows update fixes installed, and they had a cd
that came with the printer that seemed to work.

The next day, they said it was having trouble booting about 1/4 of the
time. Most of the time it would get to the desktop then reboot
itself, other times it would get a stop message about driver irqs and
the file uhcd.sys. I noticed that not all of the system tray icons
showed up before the reboot or bsod, so I checked the startup
programs, and narrowed it down to the printer. Windows consistently
boots fine with the printer drivers uninstalled, but they need to use
the printer. I tried looking for newer drivers, but the latest has
the same problem, and seems to have been designed for sp2.

I noticed some threads mentioning this problem, but they were pretty
old, and none seemed to resolve it. I've also noticed similar problem
with the same stop screen, but the solution was usually uninstalling
sp4, which isn't an option since it came on the cd. If anyone has a
solution to this I would really appreciate it.

 

[DL]

According to hp site latest driver is dated 2002, I notice there is also a
usb patch.
I assume also you installed software/drivers/printer exactly as outlined in
install instructions, and viewed FAQ's from hp

 

[Brett]

Turns out that the problem wasn't with the driver, it was with the
stupid little system tray startup program that just said the printer
was on. The printer is able to work pretty well without that.