Daxed and Confused...Printer Sharing

Dazed and Confused...Printer Sharing

Okay

Main System Vista Home Premium x64. Two printers attachewd via USB

Four Laptops, All wireless. 1 XP-works fine 2-Vista x86 cannot connect 1Win7x64-works fine.

Now, the really weird part is that everything was working correctly when I was running Avast on this system. I changed to MSE and now the Vista machines can't play together anymore...All have printer sharing enabled, All can SEE the printer, but the two laptops say they cannot connect to each other...

Oh, also another desktop running Vista x86 (all are Home Premium BTW) will not allow the printers to be shared across the WIRED or Wireless connections...any suggestions of what I missed (or goofed up on this)?

One Puzzled Michael says thanks in advance for any help offered...

Re: Dazed and Confused...Printer Sharing

Okay...I've searched the net for anything that might solve it...thought I would post my efforts here in case they remind anyone of a similar problem. I have run CCleaner to pull any faults out of the registry (this was suggested). I have also tried the local port set up \\computername\printername with no luck (access denied). What is really strange is that an XP laptop and a Windows 7 (x64) laptop BOTH can print to either printer (one Vista x86 w/ HP Deskjet 920C and one Vista x64 w/ Kodak ESP-3...both are wired to the same switch). But the two Vista x86 Laptops cannot connect to or print to either Vista PC (X86 or X64)

I have been trying to put both x86 and x64 drivers on the local (hosting) PC, but this is difficult because the Kodak drivers are a bit cryptic and I don't have the original disc for the HP.

I will keep searching and will post a solution when/if I find one

Got it FIXED!!!!!

Okay...after daze of going through post after post (I learned that Kodak printers are a BIG PAIN!!!) I was unable to connect to printers from Vista machine to Vista machine. Both XP systems and Windows 7 systems had no issues using any of my printers across the network .

Just as a note, I had performed EVERYTHING that has been suggested on this forum and any other that Google, Bing, Ask or Yahoo could come up with (Yes, I am persistent!! :D ). I even set up an XP based system to be a print server (of sorts) hoping that the Vista machines would work with this (they did not).

In an act of desperation, I took a look at my connection properties and noticed that internet Protocol 6 (TCP/IPv6) was selected...Don't remember who,what,when where or why, but I did remember that XP doesn't know anything about it.

I deselected this (it was active on all three Vista PC's) and within a few moments, all three systems were finding the printers connected to the XP "server"!!! WOW, what a pain!!

As a note to the many others who are fighting with sharing a Kodak printer (I have the ESP 3 AiO) I did discover a way to be able to load the drivers on the "remote" systems. Because the drivers are imbedded in the software package, the only way I could load the drivers was to do a full install of the printer on each of the remote systems (using a USB cable to hook up the printer to each one of them).

Once the drivers were loaded and functional, I disconnected the printer, reconnected it to the "server", then added the network Kodak printer to the remote PC. Once I had it working on the networked system (the XP "server" from the remote PC), I simply deleted the "local" copy of the Kodak printer on the printers page (it showed the printer as disconnected because it was), deleted the icons for the Kodak software on the remote systems (it won't work across the network (at least not for me) anyway) and I am now able to connect all of my PC's to the three printers connected to the XP "server".

If this helps even one person who is going through the same pain I was, I have done my "Good Deed" for the year!!!

All My Best,

Michael (the Victorious!)