Office XP Products do not see installed printers under WinXP Pro

[Ron Mann]

I have one user who has a Windows XP Pro machine that was upgraded from NT40
Workstation. At the same time, Office was upgraded from 97 to XP.

There are 2 printers installed on this machine, an HP 4500 that is attached
to a server, and a local HP2100.

If she opens the Printers folder, she sees both printers, and can open the
properties page and print test pages to both.

If she opens Excel and tries to print, she gets a message that there are no
printers installed. The same thing happens in Outlook and Access.

If she opens Word, and tries to print by clicking the print button, she gets
the same result, but if she does a File | Print, the print dialog opens, and
the pull-down list to select the printer appears empty, but if you expand
the list it shows both printers at the top of the list, with 3 or 4 blank
entries below them.

I un-installed the printers and re-installed them (through a Remote
Assistance session), and was able to print from Office fine. Then the next
day, after an overnight shutdown, the problem returned.

Any suggestions would be appreciated

 

[Ron Mann]

I think we fixed it. It appears that the user had decided that the HP4500
attached to the server was a shared printer, and needed to be configured as
such on her WinXP machine. OOPS!!!

My read here is that when she tried to print to it, it tried to connect to
the share, which tried to connect to the share, which tried to connect to
the share, which tried to connect to the share . .

Well - you get the picture!!!