select printer before printing

[Guest]

my printer is already selected with status "ready" and a check mark. yet
when i try to print i get ... ! before you can print, you need to select a
printer. what is this about and why did it start only today??? it is very
frustrating...

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

With which application are you printing? Did you try System Restoring to
yesterday? What have you installed between when it worked correctly and
today when it misbehaved?

 

[rajaat]

my printer is already selected with status "ready" and a check mark. yet
when i try to print i get ... ! before you can print, you need to select a
printer. what is this about and why did it start only today??? it is very
frustrating...

I have been getting this error for months now when I use apps such as
Word, IE7, and Notepad++. I get a similar error from Excel, "Current
printer is unavailable." Interestingly I can print test pages to any
printer I install on my machine and I can print using Notepad,
Wordpad, and MsPaint.

I did find two Knowledge Base articles that seem to apply:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q223427

and

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;873396

I have followed the advice from the first article with no success. The
second article says there is a hotfix but you need to contact
microsoft to get it. If anybody has any other ideas I would really
like to hear them.

I'm running windows xp 64.