XyWin chokes on late-model HP deskjets--and a workaround

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

This is will be a rather long explanation; I fear it has to be to be
clear. When we first got the HP 5650 Deskjet for the office, I hooked
its USB connector up to the bookkeeper's USB equipped PC, and its
parallel port up to the ancient P1 on which I was running XyWrite,
XyWin, and dBase 5 for DOS. I use XyWin to print out the subscription
invoices (cannot use TYP from XyDOS, because I need an unusual TrueType
font for our corporate letterhead). When I went to install the printer
on the P1, the CD that came with the printer wouldn't do it; it kept
looking for a USB port and, not finding one, refused to install. I had
to find the parallel port drivers on the CD, expand them, copy them to
another folder on the hard drive, and point the "Install New Printer"
Wizard to that folder. Once that was done, XyWin printed to it nicely.
Recently, that PC died. Its replacement has a USB port, so I foolishly
did the installation of the HP from HP's CD. XyWin kept telling me "bad
printer dll" and refusing to use the Windows printer driver. I had to
uninstall the HP (and remove all its associated directories, which the
uninstall Wizard left on the hard drive; and remove 500--at
least--entries from the Windows Registry), then go through Add Printer,
Have Disk, and point it to the CD I had burned of the bare parallel
drivers, without all the fancy-schmancy additions (several of which had
the same dlls in different directories, which was probably what was
throwing XyWin into a tizzy). Once that was done, XyWin was perfectly
willing to use the HP.
Moral: beware of printer add-ons, extras, and helper apps. XyWin doesn't
like them.

Patricia M. Godfrey