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ramdaol 0 Newbie Poster

I have 3 printers, 2 HP P1006 and 1 HP 1020 shared on a network with a Windows 2003 Domain and 18 workstations all of them with Windows Xp Professional. The 3 printers are connected to 3 of the workstations, shared and with bidirectional compatibility disabled and it has been working this way for about one year.
Suddenly one of the printer stopped working. The solutions was to reinstall the driver, but every time the workstation the printer is connected to is turned off, the printer stops working. Later I found that if I enable bidirection compatibility and then disable it again, the printer starts working, but only until the computer is turned off again. I can't leave bidirectional compatibility on, because then I have spoolers problems when printing from other computers over the network.
About two days after the first printer failing, a second printer started to show the same behaviour and right now, all 3 printers are doing the same.
I have tried moving the printers to a different workstation, using the drivers from installation CD, using latest drivers from HP page, and of course, contacted HP people. The problem with HP support is that they say none of these printer are desgined to work in a network. Any clue of what could be happening?

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Dani AI

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Hi - a few practical checks and fixes to narrow this down. The pattern you describe (toggling bidirectional makes the printer come back, then it fails again after the host PC is turned off) usually points to the host workstation, its USB/power settings, or the Windows print spooler rather than the printers themselves. HP telling you the devices are "not designed for network" is misleading: USB printers can be shared, but they need a stable host or a dedicated network print server.

  1. On the host PC: set Power Options to never sleep/hibernate. In Device Manager, open each USB Root Hub -> Power Management -> uncheck "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".
  2. Ensure the Print Spooler service is set to Automatic. After a failure, restart the spooler and immediately check Event Viewer (Application/System) for spooler or driver errors and note the event IDs/messages.
  3. On one client, add the printer using a Local Port pointing to \host\printer (instead of "network printer") and install the driver locally. That isolates whether clients are pulling the host driver at print time.
  4. Try an alternate driver (for example Microsoft Generic/Text Only or a different HP driver family) to see whether bidirectional calls are triggering the problem.
  5. If the issue persists, move one printer to a small dedicated print server or a router USB port so it is independent of a workstation. That proves whether the workstation USB/driver stack is the root cause.

If Event Viewer entries or spooler error messages are posted, targeted fixes (service recovery settings, driver rollbacks, or spooler hotfixes) can be suggested.

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