ms word & hp printer not playing well together

network setup:
2 x dell optiplex 300 pc's (a couple months old)
1 x dell laptop (five years old at least)
1 x hp officejet 6000 printer (installed as network printer)
ms office 97 professional (i know, i know)

the recent problem? when printing existing ms word documents, they get stuck in the print queue. the printer makes noise like it's going to print but nothing happens.

now, newly created documents print fine. old and new excel documents print fine. email (from windows live and outlook express) print fine.

i heave tried un- and re-installing the printer as an attached printer to one of the new dells. no difference.

i have downloaded and installed open office. it has no difficulty printing the old word documents although it loses the portions of the documents resulting from the EDIT | PASTE SPECIAL function (as i would have expected). but which are critical for us.

no software changes have been made since the new dells were purchased. in fact, the setup involvinig the old dell laptop and the network printer have been untouched.

i might add, there are 3 other pc's on the network. including another new dell 300 running office 97 but which prints to a hp laser. it is not expiencing this problem.

i am assuming it is the printer ... but only in interaction with ms word and no other software. this makes no sense to me though.

i'm at a loss.

any ideas?

thanks in advance.

What happens if you create a new document, and then copy and paste all of the data from an old document into it, then save it and close both documents, close and exit Word, then reopen the new document and try to print it?

Do the docs have images inside them?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Steve R Jones

Do the docs have images inside them?

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no, these are plain text documents.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jdc2000

What happens if you create a new document, and then copy and paste all of the data from an old document into it, then save it and close both documents, close and exit Word, then reopen the new document and try to print it?

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interestingly, if i cut and paste a document with a PASTE SPECIAL section at the beginning, printing fails; if i try to print a single, different page within that document, it still fails. but, if i cut and paste a section from the same document from another page without PASTE SPECIAL text, it will print.

and to add more confusion, i just opened and printed an old document that does NOT have the PASTE SPECIAL section. it printed.

the documents with the PASTE SPECIAL sections are saved on a NAS. the printer is also on the network. i wonder if for some reason the printer cannot find the PASTE SPECIAL text and so freezes?

this would explain why open office can print them. it doesnt seem to look for those PASTE SPECIAL sections.

What sort of Paste Special function are you using? If you are actually having Word include text from another document without actually pasting in that text, then this could well be your problem. It may still be a Word problem rather than a printer driver problem however.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jdc2000

What sort of Paste Special function are you using? If you are actually having Word include text from another document without actually pasting in that text, then this could well be your problem. It may still be a Word problem rather than a printer driver problem however.

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this is pretty much what it does. it automatically pastes in from the entire secondary document on the fly. so that if the secondary document has changed, the "print special" section in the main document is also changed when it is opened. sort of a master/slave merge.

i have re-installed word but there is no change.

it just seems very weird that this would affect only the 3 pc's printing on that network printer. the other pc's that use this function (and print to local printers though) have no problem.

The problem could be caused by Microsoft Word, or HP's printer drivers, or a combination of the two. Good luck finding out which of those three possibilities is the culprit. Personally, I have found that while linking documents is a great idea, it has more problems of various types than it is worth in most cases.

Things to try:

1. Connect the problem printer locally to a computer, to see if the problem goes away.

2. Print to a local copy of the printer driver for the problem printer, with the driver set to FILE. If that works, then send the printer output file to the printer.

3. Print to a .pdf printer driver to create a .pdf of the document, then print that to the problem printer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jdc2000

The problem could be caused by Microsoft Word, or HP's printer drivers, or a combination of the two. Good luck finding out which of those three possibilities is the culprit. Personally, I have found that while linking documents is a great idea, it has more problems of various types than it is worth in most cases.

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unfortunately, these are order forms / contracts. there are hundreds of them. they consist of a "standard" intro, variable middle section, and "standard" final section. every once in a while, something in the first and third portion changes and will change for ALL documents. those are the PASTE SPECIAL sections. my only other option is to change the hundreds of individual documents every time a change occurs. not very likely.

in any event, my pc does not have this problem for some reason. and it is from my pc that these are emailed, faxed, etc. so this is not a major problem. but a minor one i wish i could solve.

thanks for all the time and advice.

ps> i will try doing a direct-to-printer setup and see what happens.

ooooooo ..... kkkkkkkkk ....

3. creating and printing a pdf of the word document is no problem.

2. i don't know how to send a file created by the printer driver to the printer. i cannot open the created file and it will not "send" to the printer.

1. i connected the printer directly to the pc. lo and behold! the document printed! i turned off the pc. restarted the pc. opened the document. printed. boooo ... print freezes.

i'm giving up at the moment. i'm hoping whatever gremlins are causing this will get bored and move on. :D

If the printer was connected to an LPT port, the COPY command could be used to send the .prn file to the printer. For a network printer, this might not work.

Other options:

http://www.sharewareconnection.com/free-raw-print.htm

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...AAAKoEBU_Q9cYz