IBM Printerguy

Hi Steve - I believe your problem is with the client computer you are trying to print from (in your case the Windows XP computer). On the client computer open the Control Panel and select "Printers and Other Hardware", then click on "Printers and Faxes". Locate and right-click on the shared printer you created that points to the Vista-attached printer. Select Properties, then select Ports, and you will likely see that the box beside "Enable Bidirectional Support" is checked. Uncheck this box and then select the "General" tab, and select "Print Test Page" - this should print correctly to your Vista-attached printer.

The problem appears to be the fact that Windows, by default, enables a bi-directional printer communication link whenever a new printer is added, and this is usually fine when the printer is locally attached, but when you are printing from a client to a remote server, with this option selected the client will wait for (yet never receive) confirmation that the print job is spooled to the "printer", so the job stalls. The server will hold onto the print job (it will show as "Printing" in the both the client and server printer queue windows), yet nothing will print until the spooler service is stopped and re-started (or the server is re-started), at which time all queued jobs will print.

Disabling the bi-directional protocol/support on the client as described above should get you around this problem.

Greg, this should help your issue as well.

Hope this helps - good luck.