SOLVED! Win XP Pro -- No LPT1 in Add Printers only!? Can XP be forced to see it?

I hope the frustration of other XP users will be alleviated somehow by
the following solution that I found after exhaustive effort, with no
available help in the MS inadequate knowledge base.

When MS stops selling garbage code in the form of an overpriced OS
maybe we'll stop wasting inordinate amounts of time to inane errors.
Don't hold your breath...

Although LPT1 is still lost forever in the XP digital hell, here are
the steps that I followed to be able to print again on a locally
connected printer:

1. Remove the printer (if still there) from the Printers and Faxes
window *and* then right-click on that window, choose Print Server
Properties, Drivers tab, remove the printer drivers from there too.

2. Get to the Device Manager and Uninstall LPT1: from the Ports
section.

3-A. Shut down the system completely (power off) and disconnect the
printer from the computer (very important to disconnect it).

3-B: At some point earlier in the troubleshooting process I got into
the BIOS and found a setting somewhere to reset the BIOS to its
default settings. If you want to try this, this is a good point to do
that.

4. Restart the system and LPT1 will be listed in the Device Manager
(It was missing only in the Add Printers Wizard in my case).
Right-click on it, choose Properties, Port Settings tab and choose
LPT2: as the port name.

5. Start the Add Printer Wizard, choose Local Printer and now choose
LPT2: as the port.

Although I installed the printer drivers manually (I directed the
wizard to load them from a local folder) I would still get the
notification from the plug&play system that a new printer was
connected. I let the system load the drivers again and everything now
works as before.

Good luck!


On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 23:19:03 -0500, wrote:


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.

=/=