Printer not working after fiddling with scanner

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Guest

We're stumped on this one. The story begins with a working XP machine with a working HP Deskjet 720C attached to the parallel port. Before going to the printer, the cable passes through an old Acer scanner, which was working on another computer, but has never worked on this one, due to lack of a driver. In any case, the printer was working fine

We set out to get the scanner to work. We found a driver on the web which was not tested for XP, but might work. Downloaded it and tried it. No luck

Now we discover that the printer no longer works. When we send anything to the printer, it gets stuck in the queue with status "Error - printing" and a bubble pops up saying "This document failed to print" and little other help

We've tried a lot of things. We backed out the scanner driver, removed the scanner from the printer cable path. Deleted the printer. When we do that, XP finds the new hardware and adds the driver for it, but still won't print. We tested the printer on another computer and it works fine. The troubled computer has been restarted numerous times, and powered off and back on a few times as well

Any suggestion
Thanks, Bill and Pete Scarpero
 
Thank you very much for your info, Cari. We were not aware
of the XP's inability for stacking on the parallel port.
What we've done now is given up on the scanner and removed
it from the setup completely, so now the printer is hooked
up directly to the parallel port. We removed all drivers
for both the scanner and the printer, rebooted, and XP
detects and identifies the printer (so the cables are
fine), finds and installs the driver(s) for it, and says
it's ready to go. It still does not print when you ask it
to, though, and simply says there's and error without
giving details.

The printer worked fine before, so what could have
happened in our playing with the scanner drivers that
would prevent the printer from printing even though it's
communicating just fine?

Thanks again, Pete
 
Ok, I searched for all things related to the scanner, and found nothing. The next thing I tried - and it fixed it, incidently - was to delete lpt1 from the computer all together, and then re-add it after rebooting. Prior to doing this I also uninstalled the printer as well. Re-added the lpt1 port (did it automatically upon reboot), reinstalled the printer, did a test print, success! My theory is that even though the scanner drivers were completely removed, the computer was probably still confused by the fact that we had given 1 port two separate drivers (since XP doesn't like piggy-backing). Just an idea.

In any case, thanks so much for your help, Cari! It was MUCH appreciated.

----- Cari (MS-MVP) wrote: -----

Ensure you removed everything correctly...
http://www.coribright.com/Windows/Article One.htm

For the Scanner, go to the Device Manager and ensure that there is nothing
left under Imaging Devices. If so, right click and slect Uninstall. Reboot
afterwards.

Cari
www.coribright.com
 
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