HP 2600 Driver

I know, I know - before anyone says it these printers are a nightmare and there are lots of threads on them (I think I've checked them all!).

Having said that, we've got about 8 HP LJ2600n's around the site that are shared through a Server 2003 box and generally speaking they've worked fine for years. Apparently sharing doesn't work properly on these printers but we've honestly had next to no issues with them up until now.

A couple of days ago something changed and 2600's stopped working via the server. We reinstalled the driver and tried a newer driver (and going back to the old one) but it just will not work. When you try to view the printer details and use the driver it either crashes the spooler service or crashes explorer completely. Using the newer driver also wiped out the driver for about 5 other HP models too!

I've built a new 32-bit Server 2008 box just to host the 2600 driver and it still won't work their either. No matter what we do we cannot get them to print over the network, and while using the universal print driver stops the spooler crashing, it doesn't actually print anything. HP refuse to even speak to us because the printers are out of warranty, even though this isn't a hardware issue.

Has anyone got any suggestions at all or had any recent similar issues - Windows Update broken something?

Thanks in advance,

Chris

did you have any luck with this?

Our 2600s have all s4ht themselves recently and im struggling to get thm back working.

In the end, after much swearing and throwing of large objects at these ruddy printers, we built a virtual XP box to share them and used a sketchy driver (old original HP inf, new HP dlls that don't crash). We turned off bidirectional support on the ports and shared them - no problem!
Conveniently forgetting that XP doesn't allow more than 10 concurrent connections, of course.
Built a new Server 2003 box, no updates with anything to do with printing, add printers, sketchy driver on, turn off bidirectional support, share them... done! I haven't heard of any further problems.

Oh except that the mirrors on all the 2600s are covered in ruddy magenta toner so the colours are ridiculously faint.

The driver I used is available if you want it, but you know you shouldn't take sweets from strangers, especially on the internet.

I work with Amdian by the way, and I can confirm there was a lot of swearing involved in getting it working. :)