Epson Printer, Artisan 810

[4breezes]

Yesterday I installed an Epson Artisan 810 printer on my system. I downloaded a driver, epson13156.exe, which the Epson site recommended as being the correct driver. I test printed four pages from my hard drive. All well and good. I did no more though because it was critically low on ink. Then I shut down for the night.

This morning there is a problem booting. Things are painfully slow, but eventually everything appeared ready. I get two notices telling me that new hardware has been found: the Epson 810 and the old HP Deskjet 820Cxi. The desktop picture is populated by all the normal icons. As soon as I delete the two popup notices all the icons disappear and I'm left with only that pretty picture. When I'm lucky enough to get Task Manager to tell me what is happening it seems to indicate that AVAST is very busy. I see the cursor and/or the hourglass. It stays that way seemingly forever. It's been that way now for between six and seven hours.

I can boot into SafeMode with no problem. I think I've got to delete that new driver, for the Epson 810, and start over. But when I go to Control Panel, in SafeMode, none of the printers are listed.

So, the question of the night is, what do I do next? I'm just out of a session with Broni, so the system is clean. If I should, in fact, delete the 810 drover, how do I do that? I'm open to suggestions here.

[Train]

Epson is uninstalled through programs and Features.
I have the Artisan 730
Uninstall avast and I bet your desktop and all shows back up.
https://www.avast.com/en-us/uninstall-utility

[4breezes]

The last thing I did last night was to take the system back to a restore date. I used a week ago when Broni pronounced the machine clear and clean. That took a lot longer than I expected, and at the end a message popped up telling me that it could not be done. Then the machine rebooted.

It rebooted fairly normally, though maybe a bit slow. Along the way it popped up a message that it was having trouble with an Epson something or other, which 1) I can't remember exactly what because I was too tired, and 2) I told it to go ahead.

It continued to boot, and is now working as normal. I just test printed a Word document on that printer, and got a good copy. I'll try a picture later this morning.

Can anyone tell me what actually happened?

[jdc2000]

Check the Event Viewer logs to see if there are any clues there.

[4breezes]

Still working on this. There was nothing of interest in Event Viewer. It prints well, both text and color pictures. It's attached to the computer by a USB cable.

That's the interesting part, attached by a USB cable. I'm now working on the scanner portion. The driver I installed is supposed to run everything, printer, scanner, FAX, all of it. When I tried to bring up the scanner I've gotten a message that there is a problem, that the USB cable is not connected. I really don't understand that since it prints text perfectly well.

Then this morning, actually since I started this posting, I tried scanning again, and it works. I was able to scan a picture. Is there a problem with the USB cable? My other scanner also connected using a USB cable, but one with a big round thing near one end. The Epson scanner is on a 'regular' USB cable, one without that round thing part way along the cable. Do I need that special cable for better consistency?

[Train]

My USB cable has one of those torrid coils on each end.
Helps suppress stray magnetic fields like RFI [Radio Frequency interference].
But normally mine is now connected wired through the router.