Printing makes AIM unstable

[BenoitRen]

I've had this problem for many years now. It's not too severe, but it's annoying. I've already e-mailed Nathan Lineback about it, and he suggested to install a newer printer driver. Which I just did today, and it didn't solve anything.

After I have printed something on my HP DeskJet 840C printer (doesn't matter from which program), AIM starts to get glitchy. Every time I receive a message or send a message while the window is focussed, that window freezes. I unfreeze it by unfocussing it. It's worth noting that after it unfreezes, the IM received/sent sound is played. It's not played before.

It happens that when this scenario is in play, after several hours my Internet connection becomes unusable. Turning off the IM sounds stops it from freezing, but then my Internet connection seems to foul up even faster.

The printer driver in use is version 4.3. Used to use 2.1.

The sound card is SoundBlaster 16 PCI.

WinSock 2 upgrade is installed.

Does anyone have any ideas what the cause of my issue is?

[SlugFiller]

Just an educated guess: This could be the result of inter-process communication.

Sometimes certain methods of inter-process communication cause a program to freeze whenever any other process freezes or uses 100% CPU (Does not test messages often enough, or tests them selectively or improperly), since it runs through the current accessible processes and waits for each to process the sent message.

Method to test: Start by checking if other programs with poor event loops effect your AIM. Any program that does massive calculations (a la MD5 on a big file) in the event loop thread would do. You can also write a small program that opens a window, but then goes into a "while(true);" instead of starting an event loop, and see if that has a similar effect.

[Drugwash]

I'm experiencing quite a similar effect myself in Win98SE. However I have a Lexmark X1150, not a HP and I'm using Miranda IM with 8 simultaneous protocols (AIM included). Every time it has to play a sound for a received message, the whole system freezes for .5s to few seconds (depending on CPU/resources load) and after the sound plays (sometimes normal, sometimes choppy), everything goes back to normal.

Thing is, the printer is disconnected and the drivers (or whatever they may be) are disabled from being loaded at startup (using Codestuff Starter for that). But my browser (SlimBrowser) always fires up the spooler and with it the printer drivers.

However, all in all I couldn't swear it's the printer drivers causing this temporary hang effect but so far I couldn't put the finger on the issue and it's quite driving me mad. So it would be very nice if someone could offer some deeper insight on what the problem may be or at least ideas on what to try next.

BTW I've changed soundcard drivers, reinstalled DirectX 9.0c, to no avail. Soundcard is XtremeSound PCI by Diamond Multimedia with drivers v5.12 by C-Media while Lexmark drivers are v8.29 (latest I could find since they stopped distributing Win9x drivers for their devices).