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The Mysterious disappearing printers

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by kimdav01

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I need your expertise some of my users from credit dept are having trouble printing while the following application is open, SFD, Email, Infinium, i-many, ANSSWER, and POD Viewer.
The computer is Compaq pentium III 733 with 128 RAM.
Printer installed HP Deskjet 895, IBM4317, and HP laserjet 8150 network printer.

The problem is whenever they try to print, a message comes up that there is no printer available or the printer is not present. The printers mysteriously disappear from the Printers folder.

I tried reinstalling the printer driver, removing the LPT1 port, and it work after restarting the computer. But it keep doing the same thing after a while. I 'm not sure if this a memory issue, programs or the printer itself. Any idea?

7 replies

by ann777

This is a problem with Novell Client software and Windows.

Make sure you have installed the most recent version of the Novell Client and that all your users are running on it.

http://download.novell.com/filedist/pages/PublicSearch.jsp

Novell Client 4.83 should resolve this issue.

If you are not using any Novell software, then get rid of all the Novell protocols in Control Panel --> Network.

by kimdav01

Thanks for your suggestion. However, we are in NT4.0 environment w/ only one protocol, TCP/IP, in Network Ctrl pnl. This problem occurs randomly.
any suggetions will help.

by gary mcp

It sounds to me like your spooler service is stopping.

I don't have a permanent fix, but simply restarting the spooler service should allow your users to print agian.

Hope this helps,
Gary

by ch348922

I have seen this and the problem was resolved by replacing the NIC. Are the printers on a print servers or on other PC's local port? I had a nic that would not see a print server but would see the other local printers and print to them but any printer on a printserver would be greyed out.
You could try updating the nic driver.

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