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WinXP Printer Driver was not installed. Operation Could not be Completed.

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I have a single user who is unable to add a network printer. When she attempts to connect to the printer it gives the error message that the driver is bad (which it is not because at least 10 other people are using it). When I try to Add Printer she gets the error,”Printer Driver was not installed. Operation Could not be Completed”. When I try to install the application (as I did on the server) it says, “An error ocurred during the processing of driver ‘Canon iR5570/iR6570 PCL 5e’. — which by the way is not the driver I selected.

She has Windows XP Pro, SP2 on a brand new Dell D630 laptop and is trying to connect to the Canon 4850i copier/printer we just got (actually we have 2 and she cannot connect to either one. All the other users who have tried have been able to connect to this printer. She is also unable to load any of the drivers we have for this printer (PCL5e/c, PCL6, Postscript and Fax).

I will also state that I had a different canon copier that everyone was using so instead of adding a new printer on the server that everyone would have to connect to, I changed the driver of the one that was there. That worked for everyone but this one user. Her driver was not updated and when she tried to update it, she received a messge. So we deleted the printer to add it back — and now we cannot add it back.

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Me2, but I figured it out like this…

In reply to WinXP Printer Driver was not installed. Operation Could not be Completed.

Microsoft’s first advice was to remove the printer drivers folders:

C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Printers
C:\Windows\System32\Spool\Drivers\w32x86

then reboot and retry installation. Did not work… same result (and error) as you are getting.

Then, I checked event logs and noticed that there may be corrupted sectors in the cab files that windows xp access everytime it installs (any) printer. I then ran CHKDSK with all options (including scan for and try to recover bad sectors). When it was done, I rebooted…. then was able to install printer drivers just fine.

This was a strange fix especially since I cannot fathom how those cab files got corrupted in the first place.

-Paul D. Scallan, Jr., MCSA

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