[Myke]

I've been experiencing something rather odd with the HP Color LaserJet 2600n printers on our network, lately. Ocassionaly, they don't print out Excel files. All other applications print the jobs just fine, but not Excel.

Our Workaround:
1) Restart the computer; or
2) Print an Excel file to another printer, then print back to the 2600n printer.

Either of these two solutions resolve the issue, but I would like to keep this from happening, as it does tend to be rather annoying to deal with. Does anyone have any information regarding this scenario which could help me out? As usual, the HP support site proves to be, well, useless. Thanks in advance.

[Sampson]

It isn't that no one wants to respond to your difficulty, but it is one of those problems you really have to be onsite to diagnose.

Off the top of my head, it sounds like a memory problem. Excel may be using a lot of ram and when you go to print, there may be some difficulty with the print cache and the handshaking with Color Printer. You could use a print server device, which is nothing more than a box with a lot of memory, in front of the Printer and print to it and let it print to the laser.

[Myke]

The client is using an older computer, so I could see how that might have something to do with it. Where I get confused by this is that it has no problem printing Excel files to any other printer and can print any other type of file to the 2600n printer without any probelm. When this situation occurs, if we print an Excel file to another printer and then try to print to the 2600n, it goes through as it's expected to. It is almost like the printer needs to be shown how to print an Excel file before it can try to do it itself.

Another note about this is that it is a brand new color printer, so it's internal print server has about 64MB of RAM installed. This is to help it print large, colored documents. So I can't really see how the printer would be having memory problems with printing such a small Excel file.

I do thank you for the tip, Sampson; your help is very much appreciated. I'll look into it, but I'd like to refrain from using an additional print server in her office.

Myke

[Sampson]

It is not so much the Color Printer not having enough ram, it is the computer printing to the Color Printer that seems to have the bottleneck. Windows does not print directly to a printer but to a print cache. The print cache communicates to the printer establishes the "handshaking" all the while it is still receiving the document from the program to be printed. Delays in writing the document to the print cache or old print jobs in the cues or just general slowness in setting up the "handshaking" may cause the print cache to go south.

As I said, this is one of those problems you have to look at first hand. We had an old laser which had plenty of memory, but which shut itself down when not in use. Our computers were reasonably fast so when they sent a signal to the printer and it took a while to warm up and get ready, the print cache on the computer took the delay as meaning to standby and instead of eventually printing, just left the document in a cue and "forgot" about it. Hence, we put in a small "print server", which, as I said, was nothing other than a little box with memory that received the document from the print cache on the computer immediately, and it did the rest.

[Myke]

I've been working with this situation and it is now happening to other machines as well. As Sampson said before, it is definitely a memory issue with the PC that is experiencing the problem, not the printer. I have found that if you stop, then restart the Printer Spooler service on the affected machine, the problem is resolved, although none of the previous jobs will print (they are not in the queue, as if they already were printed).

While this does initially fix the problem, I am quite certain that this is not the last I have seen of this annoying scenario. Does anyone happen to know of a way to prevent this from happening in the future? I'd like to completely rid my network of this little pain. Thanks in advance, and thanks to Sampson for the input/insight he has provided; it is greatly appreciated.

[Myke]

I'm still experiencing this issue with the printer. As Sampson has noted, this is a memory issue, which I have narrowed down to being associated with the Print Spooler service. Does anyone happen to know how to setup a simple icon that could restart the service for the user if this happens?

While I'd prefer to fully resolve the issue, this would be a quick-fix that the user can do instead of waiting for me to restart the service for them. I'd rather they not mess with services.msc; who knows what they could accidently do. Thanks.

It should also be noted that I have disabled bidirectional communication for the printer to eliminate that possibility, yet this still happens.

[Putteken]

Create A batch file to restart the print spooler and create a shortcut to it. So that the user can for instance restart the spooler by pressing Crt - Alt - R.

Here's the content of the batch file:
===========================================================
@echo off
net stop "print spooler"
if errorlevel=1 echo Print spooler was already off
net start "print spooler"
if errorlevel=1 goto fout
exit

:fout
echo ############################################
echo # #
echo # Error: Couldn't start the print spooler! #
echo # #
echo ############################################
echo.
pause
====================================================

Please let me know if you ever find another sollution because i've got the same problem on 2 different pc's while 100 others have no problem at all.

[Myke]

I ended up creating a simple batch file which states:

NET STOP "Print Spooler"
NET START "Print Spooler"

I placed it on the client's start menu for easy access. This is our quick fix until we research this more. I will provide updates if we find anything.

This problem is now growing slowly to others (now our head exec. is experiencing the same issue). We have narrowed it down to only HP printers which clients are connected via IP rather than a print server. Bi-directional communication has been disabled, but that doesn't seem to help too much.

We would like to refrain from using a print server for each individual printer.

[Putteken]

[Putteken]

Yes,

I found the reason for our print problems.
The 2 users with the problem have a special macro button in MS Word to print on a specific tray.
This button was made in an earlier version of Word.
Apparently the macro works but it corrupts the default printer setting.

Maybe this helps for you to.

Succes,
Thomas

[Myke]

Thanks for your feedback. I took a look into the registry keys that you spoke of, but they match up just fine. Something I had not thought of, so I thank you for the insight.

As far as the macro idea goes, that does happen to make some sense. We have a couple of customized macros that I wrote about 8 months ago which deal with a completely separate printer. These macros switch the printer, then prints the first page from a specific tray with other pages printing from of a different tray. Lastly, it switches the printer back to the default printer. The macro, although written earlier this year, was written in the latest version of MS Word that we use: 2002 (Office XP). All products have the latest service packs installed.

The issue with this theory, in regards to our network, is that these macros are only used in Word, and the two main users who are experiencing this problem hardly ever even use the macros. Both are heavy users of Excel and this scenario only happens in Excel. When this happens, the user can print to the same printer in any other application or to another printer within Excel. After printing to another printer in Excel, the user can then print to the original (their default) printer.

Sorry to sound like repeating record. I just wanted to clarify the situation.

[Myke]

Well, another update on the situation at hand with the issue of printing an Excel file to an HP printer. It turns out that the scenario is not exclusive to HP printers. Another one of our employees experienced the same issue on a NEC printer. I had to set her up with the batch file to restart the service in case that it happens again.

While having this happen to another person is rather annoying a frustrating, the good news is that the problem can now be specifically pinned on Excel. Again, this does not happen with any other application, just Excel. Since all of the users who are experiencing this belong to different departments (which each has different software installed), I highly doubt that this is due to any sort of macros installed on them. Turning off bidirectional communication also does not help.

Anyone else have any clues? Endless searching has yielded no results on my end.

[jm7sa]

Hi Myke - did you ever get a solution to your problem?

I have the same problem with a couple of HP4200 printers.

Specifically: we have two work groups with seperate default printers. Users are able to print OK with Word but can not print to their default printer for Excel. Also users are only able to print one copy of a document at a time (i.e. they can not print 3 copies of a document etc)

We have some macros in word similar to yours for headed paper.

Any help gratefully received!

[Myke]

Luckily for us, the problem is not an issue anymore. We upgraded to Office 2007 about a year ago, and also upgraded machines, so I haven't heard anything from the users. Then again, I pinned the batch file which restarts the print spooler to their Start menu in case they need it. The machine upgrade might have fixed the issue if it was indeed memory related.

It's interesting that you bring up the 4200 printer, because the macros we use in Word, which were brought up earlier, dealt with an HPLJ 4250. I wonder if that's just a coincidence.

jm7sa, have you tried restarting the printer spooler service to see if that helps? I'll go through my notes and see if I can pull up any addition information for you, but it was almost 2 years ago and it could take some time finding. Sorry for not being of better help.