Vista - Vista Locking Up

Hey guys, just over the last 3 days or so i have been having problems with tasks such as word printing and changing fonts have been locking up and eventually not responding.

Now my set up is, i have My dads PC and his printer- the PC is connected into our DIR-655 Dlink router and then i have my PC in my room which is running Vista and recieves the internet wirelessly from the router in the other room.

I was trying to print from Word the other day and every time i went to print it would Not respond and i would have to close Word off. so i thought this was a word problem so i tried Open Office and even a demo version of Office 2007. Still the same thing. By now i had figured its not the programs but something else

So i reformatted last night but still have problems. What i worked out though was when i remove my dads printer from the settings in Control Panel everything works fine. Before when it was there if i went into word and tried to change the font it would lock up. As soon as i removed it from Control Panel word works fine now.

I am completely stumped on this, can anyone give me any advice?

Thanks

EDIT- Oh and by the way, my dad used to run Norton but the subscription ran out. He is now running a trial version of Kapersky Sercurity. Do you think it could be this program on his PC that is doing this because i cant even seem to locate the printer on the network anymore

Thanks

There's nothing (yet) to suggest that the word/OO lockup issue is caused by the same thing as this new inability to locate the printer, so it's best to assume you've got two separate problems for now.

The first thing I'd suggest is to update the printer driver at your end. Your machine is the one experiencing program lockups, and that shouldn't happen irrespective of what he's doing at his end. Printer drivers are code that "lives" inside Word and OO, if you like, and a buggy printer driver would certainly have the ability to make any process which enumerated printers experience "lockups".

If you're already on the latest version of that printer driver, try instead deleting the printer definition (on your PC) and instead creating a new "generic/text-only" printer to point to the same shared printer on your dad's machine. If that works (even though the output will be sucky), you can be almost sure the "real" driver from the printer manufacturer is buggy.

Obviously, before you can do this, you need to actually be able to access the printer, and it certainly sounds like a hole has to be punched through the Kaspersky configuration to allow file and printer sharing. It's too much of a coincidence that you can no longer access the printer now that he's got himself a new security suite.

I agree here. Try disabling Kaspersky for a few mins while you try to print. If the same error occurs, then that may not be the issue (but I bet it is).

Also, have him use the Norton Removal Tool to get Norton completely out of your system (that thing is a virus in itself)

~Lordbob