At every boot, I now get a spoolsv.exe Application Error. Once I reply either 'OK' or 'Cancel,' things usually go very badly. If I don't reply (and don't print!) I can keep going. This began when I tried to share my Lexmark 3200 with a WinME machine on my home network. Evidently, the ME box uses a driver which is incompatible with XP. I've stopped sharing the printer, but I can't get rid of the lingering spoolsv.exe error. How can I repair the damage?

Start > Printers & Faxes , remove all , reboot & reinstall .

Well, it was a noble suggestion :-) Now that I've tried removing, the printer shows up as has having a print job (which hadn't shown up before; it must be the job originally sent by the WinME machine). So far, I can't get rid of the printer (perhaps because of this print job), and I can't delete the print job itself -- it says "deleting" but it never goes away, even if I shut down and reboot. I'll keep at it, but I seem to be in a Catch-22 situation here. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Try using safe mode . http://www.youthtech.com/techstuff/explore_windowsxp/xptroubleshoot2.htm

Thanks again for the suggestion, John. I appreciate your persistence and willingness to help. The URL that you provided looks great, but it takes me to Device Manager on the "System" panel, which doesn't seem to cover printers. And of course, the "printer" panel is where I was before. Perhaps I've missed something? BTW, I think I understand the "big picture" a bit more clearly (not that it's helped me yet): 1. There's a lingering print job from a foreign machine with a bad driver 2. Because of that, spoolsv.exe dies whenever I boot 3. Because spoolsv.exe has died, I can't delete the print job, which means that I can't remove the existing driver 4. Which means that spoolsv.exe is always going to be doomed when I boot the machine Will safe mode let me boot the machine and skip the part where the spooler tries to handle the left-over print job? If I can intercept things at that point, there's hope....

GOT IT! I found a way to delete the offending document, whereupon the printer was immediately removed, so that I could re-add the printer with the correct driver. No more boot-time problem with spoolsv.exe to get in the way. To delete the file, I o went into the list of documents to be printed o set the troublesome document to start printing only between two specified times -- i.e., set a timeframe later in the day than now o re-booted (spoolsv.exe was not invoked because it was not yet time to print) o simply deleted the document from the queue (no print queue error had yet happened, so it could be deleted) Voila! Ain't life grand?

Been at work Ron , nice work .