I'm a field tech for a local pc shop, and I have encountered an weird problem. We recentley wiped and reloaded a customer's PC. Its a Dell 2400. After we brought it back, I installed the printer an Epson Stylus Photo RX620. It installed fine and works great in windows. However, when the computer is restarted or cold-booted It hangs just after post when the printer is on. Unpluging the printer lets the system continue to boot or enter the bios setup. My thinking is the computer is looking at the removable media drives for an OS to boot instead of the HD. I have already looked at the boot order in the bios and it apears normal even tryed putting the HD at the top of the list. If anyone has any sugestions please post. PS. I don't remember if it has the latest bios update or not.

It sounds to me like this is a USB printer and your system is trying to boot from a USB device. If there is an option in the BIOS to boot from USB device, try to turn it off.

I like hwood's idea. FWIW, I have an HP injet, USB, on a w2k box. If the printer is ON at boot, w2k goes BSOD. If I turn on the printer after boot, it's happy as a clam. Go figure. M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

Thanks, That it what I was thinking, unfortuatly I can't seem to locate the bios option to disable usb booting, Dell's have a pretty basic bios. hopefully there a bios update to fix it.

Electron: Have you checked the Device Manager for a resource conflict? I went over Dell BIOS codes and saw a stopping point prior to bootstrap load that hangs on system resource allocation error. Are the latest drivers from Epson loaded? If you migrated the system to XP, it may be an issue with the Dell BIOS as well. Sounds like a resource conflict to me. Dell Support: http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/index.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

Thanks for the info. The windows device manger didn't show any problems or conflicts, and the printer works fine after the computer boots into windows XP. The systems is not that old and has always been running XP. It was just wiped and reinstalled, the bios settings were never touched to my knowledge. I've tried loading bios defaults, but it doesn't solve the problem. As soon as I get a chance I'm gunna see if a new bios update will solve the problem.

I am having the same problem with my system. I recently rebuilt my system with a new cpu, motherboard, power supply, etc. when i boot up with my HP deskjet USB printer plugged in (it does not even have to be turned on) i get a blue screen of death. it will boot up and after the windows 2K splash screen, the blue status bar completes, and then it hangs. if i restart the computer it goes to the same screen. i have to power off, switch off the power supply, wait a few minutes and then restart. if i boot up and then plug in my printer everything works fine. what is going on? other USB devices (like a camera) can be plugged in and it works fine. please help!!