Documents stuck in print queue with "Error - Printing"

Question

This is a new laptop, Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, and I have installed drivers for my HP Laserjet CP1215, completely by-the-book and also exhausted HPs support. This printer is supposedly fully supported by W7 64 bit.

Whenever I try and print a document, from WordPad, Adobe Reader, Word, whatever, it just appears in the print queue with the Status as "Error - Printing".

If I run the HP diagnostics utility, it can print test pages, no problem. So the USB connection and actual printer are fine. They also work fine with other PCs.

I've checked the print spooler is up and running in "Services". If I stop and then re-start the print spooler, the document prints!Any help greatly appreciated, I'm running out of options here!

Answer 1

In Safe Mode, I don't seem to have any printers at all? (It's a USB printer)

Answer 2

Odd, nothing shown under Devices & Printers?

Or if you fire up msconfig, disable all startups, reboot and accept the advice msg, then use the printer?

Answer 3

I just checked and I can also use the undesirable workaround that the user saw in this thread: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-SG/w7hardware/thread/f29fa8b0-54a4-482a-8f1d-e9a041412683

I.e. setting User Account Control to "Never Notify".

(That thread seems to be tagged as answered, but there is no fix actually specified?)

So that's 3 hacks that work: never notify, restart print spooler on each job, and run programs as administrator.

Must be getting close ?!

Answer 4

Hi parrotx34,

Since the printer works when ran as an administrator, create a test user account as an administrator and see if the issue follows when you try to print or if you have more than one administrator account on the computer perform a test print in that account.

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Dena

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

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Answer 5

Hi Palcouk,

sorry, didn't see you had replied - looks like our last posts crossed. No, all the printers were gone in Safe Mode. I'll try the msconfig investigation.

Did you see my comment about "Never Notify" ?

Dana: no, I am generally logged in as an administrator, but neither my, nor another Administrator account can print unless the application is started with "Run as administrator".

thanks!