Printer portrait/landscape schizophrenia

[BJG]

A bunch of HP printers have recently lost the plot when it comes to printing pages portrait or landscape. The other day I found one which was fine if you printed 1 copy from Word, but if you tried 2 copies, pages would come out alternate portrait and landscape. I thought this was an isolated glitch but apparently others are playing similar tricks. (We tend to use mainly HP Universal Print Driver which I'm not keen on but in most cases there doesn't seem to be a choice.)

[Duke5A]

I've had goofy dealing with HP printers like this before. My personal favorite was printing multiple pages over a single page. In the end it turned out to be a driver issue on the local machine. Remove all the printers that share the afflicted driver, restart the spool service, use the print management snap-in to remove the driver bundles by hand, restart the spool service again, and add your printers back in. You may wind up with the snap-in complaining it can't remove the driver because it is in use at times, so you might want to bounce the machine if it does this.

 

To this day I don't know what causes it to lose its marbles, but this always fixes it.