Cannot install new printer in Vista (not even pdf)

[jo2008]

Hello,

I suffer from another vista issue called printerlessness. I tried to install 2 network printers, both of which were found and recognizeed correctly, but in the last step either the driver couldn't be installed or the printer mysteriously could not be connected.
After seeing this, I thought maybe this was some issue with the (2 different) printers.. but then I noticed that the Acrobat PDF printer was not there either, although Acrobat was repeatedly installed and repaired. The pdf printer will not be instlalled for some reason and hence i cannot use it for converting office documents for example. (Fortunately, Microsoft has a pdf export addon, but thats not the issue here). XPS and One note "printers" are there, though.

Now I begin to wonder if maybe this whole printer mess-up has a deeper cause.. maybe my Vista cannot add printers at all. I'm having driver issues all the time when connecting usb stuff. I had to go to device manager to let it search in the systems32 folder manually several times..
I read several threads about network printer issues and while the printers I tried were all network printers, this seems to too big of a coincidence.. but my printer repository is maxed out, so I can not test it with usb printers. My bets would be according to my thesis..

Does anybody else experience such printer chaos?


Jo

[jdhurst]

I have Adobe Acrobat Standard V9 running fine in Vista and able to create PDF's. My home printer is networked on a print server, and I was able to find a print server driver from HP for Vista that worked (a bit of a kludge to install, but it worked).

So printing in Vista Business 64-bit works. I suggest you ensure the profile you are using for printer install has (at least temporarily) administrative rights. Either that, or when you do the install, use "run as" and select administrator.

If it is a work computer, your network administrator will need to assist you.
... JDH

[jo2008]

Hello,

I have just tried to install another printer, a HP photosmart 7960, which even has Vista drivers. I have it connected via USB.

During installation, the dot4usb driver installation failed and in the device manager 2 items were in the unknown/other section. I tried to let it search for the drivers again in system32 and the HP driver install folder, but without success (it sais file not found).

When adding the printer via the "add printer" dialog, Vista throws an 0x00000002 error in the last step (after entering a printer name).

Installation fails and the printer does not become available.

So I tried a network printer, a usb printer and a pdf printer, none of which installed. I still have the original Lenovo Vista (once restored from the hidden partition). SP1 installed later. It's really a mess. Do I really have to install Vista all over?
I checked gpedit for restrictions, but everything is default there. Nothing that obviously prevents printers from installing.

There's got to be a reason for this behavior.


Jo


@jdhurst: No it's not my work computer...

[jo2008]

I did a clean install recently and now everything works fine.

I think the SP1 installation messed up Lenovo's Vista. It froze during the 3rd stage somewhen and lots of driver related issues appearead after that. The installation itself seemed to be finished though. Most things still worked despite that problem, but printers didn't

[neenee]

Did you perhaps "tweak" your system, by turning off services/disabling features before you tried installing printers?