HP2600N Intermittent Print Problem

[mokeeIT]

Having a problem with an HP2600N printer printing peer to peer on a wireless network. The printer is connected to one machine. There are two other on the network that print through that one box via MS printer sharing. All machines are running Windows Media Center (new Dells).

Sometimes when printing from the other two PCs via Internet Explorer they give an "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and must close" error. Delving deeper they report that the problem was with "c:/docume~1/USER/LOCALS~1/temp.d876_appcompat.txt". USER in that string is the username of the person logged on to the machine that is printing.

Seems like a permissions problem to me, but the people logged in have admin rights on the machine - shouldn't be a problem I would think. Word, Excel print fine. I know the peer-to-peer sharing of the printer is set up correctly, done it dozens of times before with no problems like this. I'm several hours away from them, so troubleshooting has been a bear but wondering if anyone here has encountered a problem like this before? TIA!

 

[LawnBoy]

Is the spooler service on the host pc crapping out?
Are you using the latest printer drivers all around?

 

[mokeeIT]

Doesn't seem like a spooler problem, as I said they can print with no problems at all through Word and Excel. The latest driver is installed on the host PC. I didn't install a driver on the others as they are simply connecting through the network share to the host PC. My understanding is they use the driver on the host?

 

[mokeeIT]

UPDATE: I haven't seen the error in front of me, they called me with the problem after the network was set up. I think the error should be for this file: "c:/docume~1/USER/LOCALS~1/temp/d876_appcompat.txt". Which to me looks like a temporary print file in the user's temp directory that is having some kind of problem.

Just found a reference to turning off bi-directional printing within the shared printer on the remote machines, but this did not help... my search continues!

 

[Sweg]

Could this issue have something to do with that the 2600n driver is a hostbased(GDI)driver?

 

[mokeeIT]

It very well could be! I googled up this link:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=bpl07860

and it is listed as a hosted based printer. And it states that remote desktop connections are not supported for a host-based printer. This was recommended to this client as the ideal solution for her network! Ugh!

The biggest problem now is that the wirless router is located on a different floor in the office. I might have to move the wireless router into that room with the printer so I can directly attach it to the network. Unbelievable. Hopefully this thread will get picked up by the search engines. If so, you should really research your situation before buying an HP 2600N Color Laserjet Printer!

Thanks for the help - I am still open to suggestions if you have them, but things are looking bleak for making it work using a peer to peer windows printer share...

 

[petermeachem]

I don't know if it applies to this printer, but for a HP3500 which is also a host based device, the only way to attach it to a network directly is to use a pukka HP jetdirect card (think that is teh right name), which costs a small fortune. The cheap print servers just don't work. I spent a long long time trying to do it.
We just plugged it into a pc and shared it, no problems at all.