Slow printing in Windows XP

[Guest]

I apologise for this vague query but I'm hoping someone can educate me as to
the processes involved or give me a fresh angle to investigate.

I have a user who is claiming that her PC is slow to print. She's using a
decent PC and I don't believe it's not a hardware issue. She can be in any
program, the main one we tested was Word 2003, and when she chooses to print
from the menu or presses ctrl+p it takes about 4/5 seconds for the prompt to
appear. The process 'spoolsv' gets up to about 25% CPU usage before the
prompt appears.

Now I know it's not a big deal but it's affecting this user as she's a PA
and wants things done yesterday and I just don't have an answer and feel
rather embarassed.

I have a similar user next to her who as soon as she presses ctrl+p she gets
the prompt window immediately.

I've tried removing the printer and re-adding it, removing all the printers
and the drivers and re-adding them. I noticed the PC still was using FAT32
so I converted it's drives to NTFS. Also we use roaming profiles so I had
her try it on another PC and she got the same behaviour.

This would suggest it's the roaming profile but I can't any information on
the web about what printer information is stored in the roaming profile. I'd
prefer to understand this problem and if possible surgically remove the
offending files rather than recreating her profile.

So, are there any printer gurus out there who can help me?

If I've missed any information just ask.

 

[JS]

What about the Antivirus programs on the two PC', the one that fast to print
versus the slower PC, are they the same or different?

JS

 

[Guest]

The same, both PCs use a centrally distributed version of Sophos Anti-Virus.