Why did my shared network printer stop allowing a system to print?

Question

I have four networked systems, all sharing one printer. I have three Windows XP Media Center '05 Editions, and one Windows Vista Ultimate system. The printer is an HP Officejet 6310xi All In One. Each XP system are factory built, two from HP one from Dell, all with Intel Pentium D processors, two with 4 gigs of RAM, one with 1 gig, and the Vista is an Asus motherboard, Intel Core 2 Dual, 4 gigabytes of RAM, 512mb onboard video on an ATI HD 2600 board. All four systems have printed without issue to the HP Officejet until just a couple of days ago. Nothing occurred out of the normal, and all virus scans have come up clean. The Vista system cannot print from within any application, be it a website, or an application, or a service or system utility. I get a weird error without even an error code:

"An unknown error has occurred"

Nothing shows up in Event Viewer, not a single error or warning or even information pointing to the popup statement. All very odd. I have tried everything I can think of all to no avail. I am putting this into the hands of you at Hardware.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Is it just the Vista cant print or all cant print ?

Answer 2

What a suprise it is Vista that can't do something...

ok, on the computer acting as the print server make sure under all the sharing and security that it allows vista to print.

If this is all ok then on the Vista machine locate the drivers in the device manager for the shared printer and update them. If need be then uninstall the driver and install it again with updates.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softw...

If it still dosent work (Make sure the printer is on) go to the Printers and Faxes folder (I don't know if this is the same folder in Vista) and navigate to the properties of the printer. Click the 'Ports' tab at the top and make sure it is on the correct one (on our network it is the USB001) If you then go on the Sharing tab hopefully you will see a button at the bottom saying: 'Additional Drivers' Click it and a box appears. There is a selection of drivers for the printer, if u enable and install them for vista on the machine, every time the vista machine connects to it it automatically downloads the correct driver from the computer hosting the printer.

Don't know if you tried it already, but it is what I would do.