print driver crashes explorer

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From: Anthony Ewell (aewell_at_gbis.com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:10:04 -0800

Hi All,

     Help!

     AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

     I have a customer with six identical XP-P, sp1a
computers with Okidata B4200 printers. They have all
worked flawlessly for over a year. They all use the
exact same print driver.

     As of yesterday, one of the computers decided not
to print to the B4200. Here are the symptoms:

1) The printer works fine with M$'s canned HP Laser
Jet 5p driver

2) In printers and fax's, if I right click on the
B4200 printer icon and left click on properties, I get
an application error. When I click on okay, printers and
fax's dissapears, all my desktop icon disappear, I wait
about a minute and all my desktop icon repaint.

3) If I delete the print driver, when I reboot, Plug and
Play (PnP) catches the printer and attempts to (re)install
it. At the end of the install, PnP announces that there
was a missing portion in the inf and it can not install.
A printer icon then appears in printers and fax's.
(See #2 above for symptom.)

4) If I use the add printer button (with PnP off), I
get all the way through the install to the finish
screen, then the install announces that there was a
problem. When I press finish, my computer seizes.
I have to go into task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and
kill explorer. (I use task manager's new, task
to re-run explorer to get my desktop back.)

5) Even with the HP driver installed, PnP always
catches the B4200 on boot up

6) Okidata tech support and I spent over an hour on the
phone. We looked at ever file included in the driver,
found them on the hard drive, and removed them. We
also removed every instance of B4200 from the registry.
No symptom change.

7) two other programs were corrupted, but I was able to
fix them (Quickbooks and Perform Plus) by reinstalling them.

:'(

Anyone have any ideas?

Many thanks,
--Tony 

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