I had a customer computer start to die recently and we decided, since it was 8 years old, that rather than fix it we would replace it. So, we got a new PC and I set it up. Everything was a breeze with one exception.
The old PC was windows XP Pro had an HP Laserjet 1020 printer attached to it and shared. The new PC is a Vista Ultimate machine and when setting that printer up to share again is when the problem hit. When I tried to test print to this printer from other machines on the network, the Vista machine would accept the print job but just hold it in the Print Spooler. If you stopped and restarted the spooler services on the Vista machine it would then start printing all the spooled jobs. Also, all local print jobs on the Vista machine would print immediately.
After expending a great deal of time working with permissions for the XP machine and messing with various printer settings I found a fix. On the Ports tab of the Vista machine I unchecked the box for bidirectional printing support. And… Boom! That fixed it.
I've not run into this problem before sharing printers from Vista so, I think it may be related to this model HP Printer. So remember, if you are sharing a HP Laserjet 1020 on Vista to an XP machine across a network, disable bidirectional printing support.
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