Problem sharing a printer between XP and Windows 2000

[ITdad]

Printer sharing problems seem to be rather popular (or unpopular really).

I have a printer connected to a PC running under Windows XP Professional and want to share it with another PC on our home network which is running under Windows 2000 Professional. I have turned on printer sharing on the XP machine and have instructed my firewall to allow communications with all of the IPs on our home network.

I can go to the 2000 machine and run the Add Printer wizard. It is able to see my XP machine and the shared printer that is attached to it. However, when I select the printer and click next on the menu at the bottom of the dialogue box, the process hangs.

Does anyone know why this might happen and how to remedy the problem.

(And why is sharing printers so damn difficult anyway? This really should be a simple procedure.)

 

[Zoron]

I'd install the driver locally first, then connect to it. The problem might lie in the driver installation... it may be trying to install XP drivers on that 2000 machine. Most of the time, they're interchangable... but it wouldn't surprise me if that was the problem.

Once that's done, just change the port to \computernameprintername