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Win XP Pro -- No LPT1 in Add Printers only!? Can XP be forced to see it?
Hello folks. I'm going crazy with this problem and any help would be very welcome. In order to make a very long story very short, here is the present situation: LPT1 shows up in the Device Manager with no errors whatsoever. LPT1 is enabled in the BIOS (I've tried all different settings with no improvement to the problem). LPT1 is active and working because when XP reboots it wakes up the sleeping laser printer connected to it. In addition, it recognizes the printer, loads its drivers *but* the printer installation wizard halts at the last step with the error "Printer name is not valid". When I try to add the printer manually with the Add Printer wizard, LPT1: is not there! All this happened when I installed and immediately afterwards uninstalled a program that used its own virtual printer driver (My CheckWriter - avoid at all costs!). The uninstallation looks like took the LPT1: port recognition with it. The first step was to remove both that virtual driver and the local printer's driver from both the Printers and Faxes area in Control Panel *and* the Server Properties (right-click in the Printer and Faxes window). How can I make XP forget what it knows about the LPT1: port, forget what it knows about this virtual printer driver ( I suspect there are some residual registry entries left behind), reinstall the hardware LPT1 port from the beginning (I've tried Safe Mode and removal, and also copying the drivers.cab file from the XP CD per MS Support instructions) and make the LPT1 port show up on the Add Printer wizard? Another hint: When XP reboots with the laser printer connected in LPT1, it finds it and shows *two* different names in the tooltip message in the System Tray: The msg is "New hardware found, blah, blah..." and: "Brother HL1650_HL1670N", and after a couple seconds it becomes: "Brother HL1650/HL1670N" (notice the "/" instead of "_"). This happened both with when XP tried to use the existing drivers from the system and when I downloaded the latest drivers from the Brother website (which I think may have been exactly the same with the ones already installed). I've also tried to recover the system using XP's recovery feature. There was a snapshot saved right after that virtual driver's installation (!) and one two days before. I tried recovery with both sets but after going through the recovery steps XP balked and said recovery is not possible! No explanation, no details no nothing. Someone suggested to reinstall XP Pro. If I reinstall it in the same directory is there a possibility that this will cure the problem without me having to reinstall any software? Is there a way to recover older versions of the registry maybe? Is XP saving multiple registry copies somewhere like it did in Win 98? Thank you very much for your time and patience in reading this. Dell's tech support (my desktop system in question) was not helpful at all. In addition I've been looking all over the net all day today and I've seen a couple of similar questions but no answers to them. Any suggestions will be very very welcome and appreciated. =/= |
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