Failing HP print drivers

[Mrugson]

Hello,

I am a part of a support team for an estate of 4 global print servers (3 x Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SP2, 1 x Windows Server 2000 SP4) with over a 1000 print queues setup on each one of them. The problem I have encountered recently is that some of the HP driver are failing, giving the below error message:

"The 'HP Color LaserJet CP2020 PCL 6' printer driver is not installed on this computer. Some printer properties will not be accessible unless you install the printer driver. Do you want to install the driver now?"

The most problematic of them is HP Color LaserJet CP2020 PCL 6 driver used for HP CLJ 2025dn as the device is a duplex printer and is supposed to be fast - HP Universal Printing PCL driver offers duplex printing but does not offer acceptable speed, HP Color LaserJet is faster but duplex is unavailable. It seems to fail even on small local print servers with only 4 PQs set up and 20+ drivers installed - I've created a test PQ on the server and it was working for one afternoon but next morning when I got onto the server I got the error message when trying to access printer properties.

Have someone maybe encountered issue with that print driver or similar? Any help would be very much appriciated!

Thanks a lot!

Other printer drivers failing are:

HP LaserJet 2200 PS

HP OfficeJet Pro K8600 Series

HP LJ P4010_P4510 Series PCL6

HP Color LaserJet 4600 PS

HP Color LaserJet 4650 PS

Driver file versions:

UNIDRV.dll 6.0.6001.22127 (vistasp1_ldr.080302-0124)

PSCRIPT5.dll 6.0.6001.22127 (vistasp1_ldr.080302-0124)

[cluberti]

Usually you run into that when the client's check of the driver version (versus what the server has) fails, but the problem isn't the client driver, it's the print server driver (and likely it's a registry issue with said print driver). I've seen this happen many times with HP drivers on print servers (regardless of load), and the only real way I found to "fix" it is to remove the server queue, remove the print driver, re-install the queue and driver, and have clients update. Part of the reason HP moved to the new universal driver format was to fix issues like this - it's either speed or stability, your choice .

[Mrugson]

Cluberti, thank you very much for that. I was kind of hoping I won't have to recreate the PQs and re-install the drivers but that is what I am going to do now

And thanks to your advise I think I know where the problem started...

Much appriciated, cheers!