HP Color Laserjet 1600 - automatically deleted

[boweasel]

A friend has an HP Color Laserjet 1600 and she asked me to have a look at why it wasn't printing. I clicked on the printer icon in the control panel which brought up the printer. When I right clicked on the printer, it displayed the words 'paused - deleting'. I un-paused the printer, the documents in her queue printed, and the printer disappeared.

I re-installed the printer but could never get anything to print. The first item in the print queue would have a printing status of 'error-printing'. Running the Windows troubleshooter yielded nothing. I could not print a test page, print from DOS, etc..

I then did a system restore to get her system back to a week ago. The printer once again said paused - deleting, only the documents were the new documents I'd tried to print after the re-install. I un-paused and the new documents printed. And the printer again disappeared.

I can't seem to fix this. Any ideas?

 

[PRPhx]

Hmmm. That is weird. Have you done a virus scan? Also do a defrag on the hdd and run chkdsk. (I've seen fragmented drives do really weird things in the past).

If the above doesn't work, try removing the printer software from add/remove programs. Once that is done, run a registry cleaner. After THAT is complete, manually edit the system registry. Do a search for hp laserjet 1600 and delete all instances you find. I've foound that hp leaves a ton of stuff in the registry and doing a re-install can be problematic. (oh, and before I forget, before you make any system registry changes, back it up!)

Now re-install the printer software. Does that help at all?

 

[boweasel]

Thanks for the help. She lives about 25 minutes away, so I won't get a chance to try your suggestions immediately, but I'll post back when I do.