Hi People, Thought I might let you know about a bit of fun we've been having with HP printers on NT 4.0 TSE/Metaframe 1.8 SP2. One of my customers has a very diverse range of HP printers with a total of some 200+ network print queues. All printing from the TSE systems is to a network printer share, with no direct printing. Many of the printers are multi-bin and use a variety of forms/stationery. While the printer environment had been pretty stable, the advent of an HP color laserjet 4600 started the rot. The 4600 drivers will BSOD a server with either a stop 0x50 or stop 0x1E fairly readily. When we contacted HP, they advised us that the 4600 code had been frozen and that we should use the 4500 series drivers in the interim. However we had also been having the very occasional stop 0x1E with PCL 5 and postscript drivers. HP offered us a new batch of terminal server friendly drivers for many of our existing printers. Dumb move on our parts. While the new drivers were rock solid with regard to not causing BSODs, they did have one little problem. Over the last 3 months we've been having increasing problems with print jobs failing to newer printers. In a farm of 17 servers 1 or more servers in any one day will get inoperative printers where test print jobs will fail with an error 119 "The system will not support the command requseted" and regular printing just fails. Note this will happen for only one driver and swapping the driver from, for example an HP 2200 PCL 6 to an HP laserjet 2200 PCL 5e will allow users to print. Until the %e driver hangs and the PCL 6 still works. Problems are limited to that server only, and all other servers printing to the same queues work fine. Attendant symptoms were that there were a number of printer driver DLLs that failed to unload from the application trying to print explorer.exe and spoolss.exe. If the server was rebooted everything was fine for the next week or so (2 daily reboots) and if it wasn't rebooted, things would generally be okay by the time most of the users had logged out at the end of the day. Essentially what appears to happen is that the print job is aborted with the above error right at the point of print job output. Resetting any instances of applications and explorer.exe with "stuck" DLLs followed by a spooler restart didn't help. What is interesting is that some drivers are locked, despite no processes showing these DLLs loaded (using listdlls.exe - sysinternals). It became fairly obvious that all the "problem" drivers had things in common. HP has introduced a new smart driver architecture that is application aware and able to autoconfigure itself by querying the printer. This means all of the new HP drivers that include hpbafd32.dll are potentially a problem. HP suggested getting rid of all print monitors with no improvement. We managed to develop a scenario where the problem was reproducible, as did HP. Our little bug uncovered a code problem with all the new win2k and NT 4.0 TSE compatible drivers and HP (Rob Tuft) let us know that their win2k drivers are now fixed, but no fix in sight for NT 4.0 TSE. HP are preparing to escalate the problem to Microsoft but we're not holding our breaths. Our choice is now between an occasional BSOD that affects 50-60 users at a time and a really annoying printer problem that affects 5-10 people a day. Since my customer is going slowly nuts (I haven't got that problem since I'm there already ;-)) I suspect BSODs are almost preferable, but that's not a good politically correct decision. Moral of the story? Beware of the latest HP printer drivers on NT 4.0 TSE. And if you've got odd printer hangs in win2k on HP printers, check to see if driver DLLs are not being unloaded and update (with care!!). Regards, Rick Ulrich Mack rmack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Volante Solutions 18 Heussler Terrace, Milton 4064 Queensland Australia. tel +61 7 3246 7777 ********************************************************************** This email may be confidential and/or privileged. Only the intended recipient may access or use it. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient please notify us immediately by return email and then erase the email. We use virus scanning software but exclude all liability for viruses or similar in any attachment or message...,..,..,. ********************************************************************** =================================== This weeks Sponsor: triCerat, Inc ScrewDrivers fxp: Self Configuring Printer Driver with Bandwidth Control Learn more at: http://www.tricerat.com/?page=products&product=sdfxp =================================== For Archives, to Unsubscribe, Subscribe or set Digest or Vacation mode use the below link. http://thethin.net/citrixlist.cfm