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Phantom printer?

G

Gustavus

Golden Member
I have a LAN with several computers on it, two of which have printers associated with them that are shared with the other computers on the net. These work just fine -- meaning I can print on either of the printers from any one of the computers.

So far, so good. The problem is that there is a phantom printer on one of the computers; call it A. When I show the workgroup computers on any computer other than A and then click on A to show the shared files etc., a Printer 5 shows up . There is the usual icon for shared printers and faxes which if I click on it shows the printer actually shared by A with the LAN. Nothing I can do on A shows Printer 5, nor do I have any idea of where it came from or how to delete it; which is what I would like to do. It cannot be deleted from any of the other computers, so to get rid of it I apparently must find it on A. I never set up a Printer 5, nor do I have any idea of what it is.

Thanks for any suggestions or help.
 
Shot in the dark, but do a registry search on the host computer for "Printer5" and delete any entries you find. It should only be in HKLM and HKCU.
 
Thanks for the suggestion. I did a complete regedit search on printer 5 and Printer 5 with no hits for either. It has to be somewhere -- but where is a complete mystery. It's presence in the display on the other computers is only a small annoyance since the LAN works as it should. I would just like to have everything show as it should.
 
Is this computer running a different OS than the others on the LAN, or is there software on this computer that is not on the other LAN computers, that might have created this phantom printer?

Deeper analysis is called for on computer "A".

 
To add another shot in the dark, it could just be some problem with the File and Printer sharing service. You can try removing it and readding it and see if that yields any results. Are the computers in question all up to date with patches from Microsoft?
 
Thanks to everyone who has responded.

Four of the computers on the LAN are running Windows XP Pro with SP2 installed. One of those is the one I called A that shows up as having a phantom Printer 5 on it on the other computers. My wife's computer is a Dell (ugh!) which is running Windows XP Home with SP2 installed. All machines have the latest Windows patches installed.

All machines are completely stable, and as I said, the LAN works very well. The phantom printer causes no problem at all, it is just that I don't like having something appear that shouldn't be there. All computers can print on either of the shared printers (an HP 7350 for photos etc. on computer A and an old HP LaserJet Series II for documents on the computer in my office) and share files from any machine to any other.
 
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