Printing/Office 2003 Problem Printout corrupt

[Frazer]

Over the Easter holidays I took the oppotunity to upgrade our pupil workstations to XP Pro SP2 (inc march/april updates) Office 2003 via a new image. Previously it was Office 2000 on XP Pro SP1 with updates.

 

Some students are finding when they print their work, it comes out completely messed up. An example is below:

On screen:

Implementation of database

On printout:

Nslchshak,      k18a 84   t,k,6,2h            l,     h

 

I first printed out the document on one of our machines. This consisted of XP SP2, Office 2003, Admin logged in, no changes made to the document, HP 2200 (PCL - doesnt say what version) printer connected to other tech's pc and shared over network. This worked and the pupil went away happy.

 

I then tried to fix the problem so that the pupil could print in their ICT suite properly next time.

I tried copying and pasting the document into a new document - no joy.

I then noticed at the top Word 2003 now incorperates the font into the Style field, rather than displaying "normal" and font serperately.

This particular font was Veranda. I changed this to Times New Roman and the printing problem went away.

 

To me this points to the printer supporting the font, but Veranda has been used in the past and has not caused any problems.

 

This particular printer is a HP2300N (PCL 5e) which is installed as a 'local' printer on our Windows 2000 Server using TCP/IP port and then shared to the pupils.

 

Does this point to a problem with Office 2003?

Could something have messed up while copying the printer drivers over on first use?(we did this logged in as admins after ghosting)

Has anything major been changed from SP1->SP2 in the way that XP handles printing?

Any suggestions would be appreciated

[Ric_]

I suggest that you try re-installing the printer driver. HP tend to have 'scrubbing' utlities on their website to uninstall any existing drivers.

[tosca925]

Yep, definately sounds like a printer driver problem.

 

Yes Ric_ is spot on we used one of these utilities to good use only last week.