Re: Procedure for Working Around Printer Errors

["Thomas J Hawley" tjh@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Robert Holmgren"  on Tue,
31 Aug 2004 17:24:30 -0400

It's possible in Windows 2000 and XP (and perhaps earlier versions too,
but not verified by me) that DOS printing will break while Windows
printing will continue to work fine. The typical symptoms: Xywrite and
other DOS apps won't print, although Windows apps print as before.
Attempting to do a print from the command line (e.g., dir *.* >lpt1) gives
an "Access denied" message. Disabling LPT1 in Device Manager, and then
immediately enabling it, often fixes the problem until you print from a
Windows app, and then it's broken again. You can delete and reinstall
printers, ports, etc. with mixed results; sometimes, it seems impossible
to fix.

One thing (and I think there is more than one) that I know from experience
causes this is the installation of an HP3330 USB printer; it seems like
the USB connection uses some of the LPT resources in such a way that
Windows is not affected but DOS is. But there is practically no
documentation on how Windows handles DOS print jobs, and it's very hard to
debug. The offending USB "port" can't be deleted in Windows, but you can,
in XP, roll back to a checkpoint prior to when the USB device was
installed, and that seems to work.

The RawPrint utility is a good workaround, but who wants to go through a
tyf and then a do/nv for every print job?

And no one is interested in DOS printing difficulties any more; indeed,
when you mention "DOS application", many support people have no idea what
you're talking about, having never seen one.

Tom Hawley
New York
tjh@xxxxxxxx