OK, here is what's going on. Our company has recently upgraded from Windows2000 to XP. There have been a few users recently (maybe about 2 months after the upgrade, so this problem didn't happen instantly) who have lost the ability to print to their local printers (LPT1)... No matter what I do, uninstall, reinstall both printer, drivers, and the LPT1 port, NOTHING will fix it! The only fix I have found is this. I can log onto the local machine (instead of our domain) and rename their profile. Then, if I let XP rebuild their profile name, the problem is fixed. Does anyone have any clue on why this is happening, or a faster way to fix this than what I have come up with? Any advice would be welcome. Here are the stats of the computers: They are either Compaq Deskpro EN's at 733mhz, or Dell GX240's which run at 1.something ghz. The machines have between 256, and 512 DDR RAM, and all computers are on Windows XP. It seems to be a sporatic problem, with no real pattern. Again, thanks for any help in advance.

Are all your services running for print jobs? Are there any errors in the event log? My guess would be some of the files did not upgrade properly or the profiles did not get updated properly during the upgrade. If these profiles are used over a LAN, they can have problems unloading from memory to get updated, so you would have to manually fix these profiles, or ensure the profiles unload properly before doing the upgrade. I'm sure there is a easier solution, but it hasn't been that big of a problem for me to worry about. J.

try upgrading the drivers. allso the firmware on the printers might not support the fonts or something that XP wants to use. i would try to see if this works for now as a work around: go into services console {rclick MY COMPUTER and select MANAGE now select SERVICES} stop and restart the spooler service on the local machine that the printer is tied to. good luck AJ "ye of itchy azz hole, have stinky finger"

In case anyone ever runs into this problem, I figured it out ... I dropped to a DOS prompt and typed NET USE I saw that LPT1 was mapped to something weird, so I typed: net use lpt1 /d to remove the mapping to the lpt1 port. it worked. thanks for everyones advice though!

Sounds like your profile had a old setting which needed to be updated. Glad you fixed it. J.