Trouble Printing to Printer Connected to Another PC

[chinnboy]

I'm running two Dell PCs running WinXP Home SP2 thru a router. The printer on PC#2 is set for sharing and shows up fine on PC#1. I tried printing from PC#1 to a printer on PC#2, but nothing makes it there and the print spool (spoolsv.exe) on #1 runs interminably gobbling 95+% of my system resources. I'm pretty much out of business unless I shut the spool down in Task Manager, and once I do that I have limited ability to look at or mess with printer settings on PC#1. Print jobs sent from #2 to printers on #1 work fine.

I looked at C:\system32\spool\printers on both and there is nothing on #2 and two old tiny .tmp files on #1. I don't think thats an issue. One thing I did notice that is when I check properties of the printer on PC#1 it shows up as not shared even though its set up as shared on the local PC#2. If I try to change it to shared on #1 it doesn't seem to take.

I've googled and consulted my 2 1/2 inch thick XP bibles and found nothing to help, and I can't figure what else to try. If anyone has any thoughts or ideas it would be appreciated.

 

[amdskip]

What kind of a printer is it? I had to deal with something similar to this and it was not solved. The conclustion was that the Dell/Lexmark printers (all 3 new btw) were junk.

 

[chinnboy]

Its a Canon S82 inkjet. I'm pretty sure it worked with my prrevious setup, but my wife's (PC#2) Dell 4500 croaked nand I replaced it with a 4700.

I don't think its a hardware issue. It seems like PC1 thinks the printer is directly connected and is not even sending the print job to the network.

 

[Fardringle]

This article has an excellent step-by-step guide to set up printing on a home network as well as basic troubleshooting to fix problems like the one you are having. I highly recommend that you read through it and make sure everything is configured properly (if I was going to give you instructions I'd just summarize what is there) and then let us know if it still doesn't work. 🙂

 

[chinnboy]

Thanks Fardringle. I've bookmarked the article and will go thru it step by step when I get home from work tonite.

 

[chinnboy]

I went thru everything in the article, even the stuff it said applied only to XP Professional. I suspect it has not been updated since before SP2 as there were some surpises based on the conent of the article.

I turned off the firewall on PC2. I also discovered that username "Guest" was disabled. I did nothing to do that, but I went ahead and activated it.

Unfortunately none of these things had any effect. If I try to send a print job to PC#2 spoolsv.exe grabs nearly all system resources and chases its tail. Rebooting doesn't even cure it, you have to cancel the print job before rebooting or the machine starts up with spoosv.eve hogging the system.

not looking good....

 

[crobusa]

That's wierd.. Have you tried disabling firewalls on BOTH computers?
Can the Client see the server printer?
Have you deleted/recreated the printer under a differnt name?
Is spoolsv.exe located in C:\Windows\System32? Any other place, and it could be a trojan.

 

[MrColin]

Some software firewalls will prevent the printer drivers from working on the client machines. You might even need to put the cannon disk in computer #1. I don't think you need the guest accounts activated.

 

[chinnboy]

Originally posted by: crobusa
Can the Client see the server printer?
Have you deleted/recreated the printer under a differnt name?

Thanks crobusa!

It always could see the server printer. The address for the the server printer was correct, so I didn't mess with it. But I just deleted it, rebooted, and then searched for it and added it again. Works like a charm. Something I did on the server must have changed something, but the existing setting on the client must have retained whatever was screwing it up even though it does not show.

Thanks again crobusa, and everyone else who took the time to help me. I hope I can reciprocate somehow some day here or somewhere else.