Win 2000 Pro Printing Nightmare

[roback]

I currently run a small visual basic program on a stand alone pc running 2000 pro. It is hooked via parallel to a stand alone laser printer. i went to print something the other day and out came spitting giberish, lots of printer control and detail information. I have looked everywhere and have gotten various suggestions that have turned out to be useless. I have removed the driver with the printer d/c. I even removed the driver from the registry. When I go to reinstall the driver the machine says it is still there and wants to know if I want to replace it? I have hooked up a couple of different printers to the pc and they are not auto detected. In fact, what comes up offers me choices as to what has been detected ... no printers. No matter what I do gibberish now spits out of the printer. It is not program specific as any program, word, etc. will produce the same results. Do you have any idea what might be going on? One person from MSFT said it might be a LP1 mapping problem and that I can run net use from the run menu but it only brings a screen us for seconds and I cannot read it! I have turned the spooler off and on with no luck. I ran a self-test on the printer and it did fine, so I suspect it is not the printer. If you have any ideas, or anyone I can talk to that is knowledgeable about printer issues with 2000 Pro I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[g-paw]

At least with HP you had to get software from their website to completely uninstall the printer to be able to reinstall the printer. I ran 2000 for years and it seems that as time went on I had more problems with, especially recognizing wireless LAN cards but other issues as well and ended up frequently doing clean install to fix problems, which if you haven't done so you could try. About a year and and half or so broke down a got a version of OEM XP Home. Just seemed like 2000 had more and more problems over the years with program and driver updates. At least with a little work you can XP to look and work like 2000. Probably not much help but how I solved by 2000 problems on a number of machines, have had to buy too many copies of XP though, too many machines