Motherboard conflict with Epson driver

Coonah · Mar 20, 2014

I work as a mobile tech and have been stumped by this problem. Installed a new PC for a screen printing business today and have had a nightmare. It's running an ASRock B85M-HDSB85m motherboard 8G DDR 1600 Intel Core i5 4440 and 1x Kingston HyperX SSD 120G and 1x Kingston 60G SSD as a scratch drive it also runs an Nvidia GT640 as it is designed for heavy Photoshop and Large Adobe illustrator files. The machine needs to print to an Epson Stylus Pro 4450 which is printing on a network. The PC picks up the printer on the network, installs it no problem and prints to it but prints badly. The vertical lines are doubled no matter what setting we try. It does this printing from Adobe or MS Office or even notepad. On the second Windows fresh install I did today to try to isolate the problem it printed properly once for no real reason other than I had a bare-bones install with no other chipset drivers installed... Installed MS Office, problem was back.Tried the latest drivers, generic drivers, uninstalled Graphics card drivers, tried another graphics card and the onboard GPU all with the same result, doubled vertical print width. Every other PC in the building, all older models and different boards but running the same version of Win 7 64bit, print fine to the Epson. And this PC prints to other printers fine!!!!. My last resort is to swap out the motherboard and try another one as the main designer needs to use this machine. A pity as I was getting some nice benches for drive speeds and loading times with that board. Has anyone ever heard of an issue like this or can suggest a solution? We are just at a loss to explain it and I just thought I'd post here as a last resort.
I am going to try a different Motherboard tomorrow but am concerned that then it might be the SSD drivers or CPU causing the conflict.
Wow... it's been a hell of a day

Cjar · Mar 20, 2014

Maybe you have a dll conflict ? try install printer driver last.
is driver version for printer same as others? is it 32bit version? 64bit version?
configuration is the same? mainly look at print processor settings.

good luck

2Be_or_Not2Be · Mar 20, 2014

Since it worked w/o any applications installed, that would seem to rule out the hardware. Although not specifically mentioned, I have inferred that you're running Win7 x64 on this machine. From what you've said, it sounds like you're using the same print driver as the other PCs. Now, I can't tell if this one is running SP1 and the rest are or aren't, but hopefully that isn't part of the issue. I also can't tell if you're running the same version / service pack of Office as the rest.

I would offer this - you likely are having a problem with that printer driver. I would remove the print driver completely from that system first. It might be best to start with a fresh Win install to ensure you can still print okay from the beginning. Then make sure you are installing the new print driver as an Administrator; don't simply allow it to auto-install from the print server under the user acct. When you attach to the printer queue again, again, make sure you're doing so under an Admin acct. Test again to see if you can print okay.

The key is to have something that you can replicate so that you know exactly where in the process you get a failure. That's the only way you're going to isolate this problem.

Then install Office again. If it fails after, you might have a problem with printing OpenType fonts. Make sure you're using a Postscript driver with the printer, and then go through the options on it. Maybe you can force it to compose the print job as an image on your PC first, and then send that to the printer.

Finally, if you're running some type of Pantone-matching, make sure that you have the latest version of your graphics driver. Then go through the color-profile settings to see if everything is right there.

Coonah · Mar 20, 2014

Thanks very much for both of those answers.
Just to recap and add a bit of info.
Yes Running Win 7 64bit SP1 on all machines, same driver as other systems, 64bit Win 7 Epson driver. Install under Administrator account is the only thing I haven't tried yet and will before going for the new MB this morning.
The main reason I'm almost sold on a new motherboard is that as Cjar said that there is a dll conflict. There is an unknown device that does not seem to exist on the motherboard and that conflict may associated with the Asrock LAN drivers, effectively a hardware conflict which has no real solution as there are no generic drivers for that NIC that I can find and no alternative Epson drivers either.
I'm fairly sure the print driver that auto-installs is a postscript driver and the designer ensured all the settings were correct, although there is a tool called remote panel we have not used as it is not used on any of the other machines.
Thanks again for the info.... Will let you know 2Be how the administrator account install went.

As for Pantone-matchng and Postscript drivers, the issue occurs when printing from notepad on a fresh install of Windows without any Adobe, Office or any other software to get in the way.

Coonah · Mar 20, 2014

Oh and the other thing 2Be is that we only got 1 good print on a fresh instal of Windows but then without rhyme or reason or installing anything else the second test printed failed again.

2Be_or_Not2Be · Mar 21, 2014

I would still go back to the print driver - possibly something that doesn't get installed properly or an option that is screwing things up. If you had problems with the NIC, then it would likely manifest itself in more errors than only a specific one - that of printing.

I have had issues wherein a driver that wasn't installed under an Admin acct wouldn't install or didn't replace existing drivers. I've also seen problems wherein having Bi-directional support enabled caused problems. Sometimes you might have to set the option to spool the whole print job first. There can be a whole slew of options to go through on a custom printer driver, so have fun with it.

It might also be worth connecting the printer locally to it. If you can print to it through parallel/USB, then the problem likely isn't the print driver. I would also connect a standard laser to it (both locally and through a network queue) to see if the problems follows the printer/print queue.

Coonah · Mar 21, 2014

So the plot thickens. It seems that 2 other machines on the network are experiencing this problem which means the new build is fine. Have tried bring across the driver from a machine we know prints properly but the problem persists. All other printers print fine from every machine, it is a very strange problem.
These guys are experienced graphics artists and have been using this printer for some time so they know all the correct settings the printer should have. The prints are being spooled as images first before being sent to print, so that's ruled out.
Still at a loss. The only thing i can think of now is that there is some sort of information ghosting issue with the particular switch that the non-functioning PC's are printing through or some sort of .net framework issue. Then there is the possibility that there is a problem with the printer it's self and that it only prints for particular machines.
Still stumped.

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Motherboard conflict with Epson driver

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