I recently installed a printer and on an XP machine which is peer to peer networked with 5 other machines. Each of these other machines has a shared local printer. My problem is with the first machine the printer sporadically stops printing. When I check out the properties and look at the port settings of printer, all ports have disappeared! The list is blank. Once I restart machine the ports appear again and the printer starts working again! Any ideas why this is happening and what I could do to resolve it?