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Illegal operation-printing

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by jhicks

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Have a customer that has 98 and 95 on the desktops. Running Novell 4.1 on their only server. They have 2 HP laserJet 4000 printers htat are shared on the network. Running both TCP/IP and IPX/SPX on the network. The problem is that there are quite a few users that are getting Illegal operations when they try to print from Excel 97 to the Network printers. Usually happens 3 to 4 times a day per user. I beleive that most of the office 97 packages are updated to the newest SP's and Updates. Anyone have any ideas. There are only about 30 users. It's a very basic network, I'm just not terrific in Novell. Thanks

8 replies

by q2ggirl

Not sure if you used Jet Admin to create the print queue, object, server information in the tree, but I would delete the printer driver on a few PC's and download new ones. Also since the printers have IP addresses, you can install the HP Network Printer software on a few PC's to see if that helps. Here is the link:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DriverDownload.jsp?pnameOID=19656&locale=en_US&taskId=135&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=27908&swEnvOID=20

If the link doesn't work, do a search under support and drivers for printer wizard and then select your OS.

Most of the time it's the driver that causes those illegal operation errors. Especially since you think the Office 97 has Service Pack 2 installed.

by pierrejamme

You didn't say what the error was? If you aare getting Print Spool Errors then this is not a Netware problem, but a well known Win9x issue. There is a workaround. Get a copy of the Millenium version of the file
and using SFC extract the file. This will stop spool errors, but the downside is that you will have to revert back to the original version of
spoolss.dll to use "Windows Update". If you do not have access to this dll, I can e-mail you one. Do you know how to use SFC?

by jhicks

There is no spool error. Just an illegal operation that locks up Excel and the PC. I wish the error gave more detail but it doesn't.

by budthegrey

Make sure the printer objects on Windows are set to "print directly to printer". The NetWare print queue is already spooling, why make windows take another performace hit to spool stuff too?

Make sure you have the latest drivers from HP, although I did have one experience with Win95 where *downgrading* to use the MicroSoft supplied LaserJet II driver solved a couple printing issues.

Also, make sure the NetWare client on the workstaion is installed in IPX mode only (the "default" install uses both protocols, can can cause difficulties). NW4.11 really only wants IPX, so use just that.

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