Vista - A solution for extremely slow printing in Vista

This extremely slow printing in Vista x64 droze me crazy for a year and I
found a fix.
The Epson R800 creates an audit file called EPAUDF01.AUD in
C:\ProgramData\Epson\Printer.

Delete this file.

After deleting this file, printing is fast. It makes an incredible
difference.

I used the Vista resource monitor to find out what was causing the heavy
disk activity when splwow64.exe showed it was thunking the spooler.

In my case this Epson audit file grew to 36MB. Now, after deleting, it
recreated itself as just 1KB.

So who's bug is this?

It seems like both an Epson and Microsoft bug. It is Epson for creating a
large audit file, and Microsoft for having a slow disk write in Vista for
whatever mechanism Epson is using to write this file.

Nice to be able to actually use the printer!

Got a similar problem, but the logging solutions doesn't seem to be the problem here.

Seems whenever anything to do with the printer happens, there seems to be some small network activity by the splwow64exe. Even resizing columns in excel after doing a print preview, triggers network activity and a corresponding delay before the column is resized.

I've got a networked Kyocera printer, with no folder in Program Files to check out a log file (like the epson solution). Resource Monitor doesn't seem to show any disk activity during the network activity.

I'm guessing that windows keeps communicating with the printer for something when processing anything to do with the printer.

Until now I thought I'd set the printer up wrong (new computer) but now that a lot of other people are having a simlar problem, maybe it's not me after all.

Yes. I've got the same problems.

I've deleted the Audit file, I'm running with 2GB of RAM.

For other reasons I've got UAC disabled.

I've de-installed the printer, downloaded the latest drivers and re-installed.

All to no avail.

Oh, how I wish for XP!

Brent Wherry