Canon S500: The handle is invalid

[parsifal]

The handle is invalid.

[confus-ed]

So its still busted ? I dunno what to say now .. the only thing I can think of is some orphan/spurious registery entries maybe doing it, but we are now well into the land of guesswork .. I suppose I could suggest sp2 (since that fixes ' miscellaneous memory handling & timing faults' among other things, mind it breaks quite a few too, so I'm not so keen ..) as various hotfixes I have found vaguely relating to this all now allegedly are fixed by that.

What are we actually printing & with what product ? (the s/w) .. I can find lots of KB's to do with sql errors, we aren't by chance printing some d/b or linked spread sheet ?

[parsifal]

So its still busted ? I dunno what to say now .. the only thing I can think of is some orphan/spurious registery entries maybe doing it, but we are now well into the land of guesswork

I did browse through some registry entries relating to parallel port (bad characters in keys and entries), but that seemed not to be the problem.

What are we actually printing & with what product ? (the s/w) .. I can find lots of KB's to do with sql errors, we aren't by chance printing some d/b or linked spread sheet ?

From blank notepad window to word documents and shared printing (on a home network). Nothing too complex.

Well, I guess it could be some mischievous background process or something, although the occurence of the problem is quite random and only uptime related, it seems.

I think I'm going to get my hands on a USB cable and connect the printer through it, though it is not the solution I'm after. And it's probably quite doubtful if it'll even work. But I'm giving it a shot.

[confus-ed]

..I think I'm going to get my hands on a USB cable and
connect the printer through it, though it is not the solution I'm after. And it's probably quite doubtful if it'll even work. But I'm giving it a shot.

Well a usb cable shouldn't cost the earth if you shop carefully (beware such places as PC world they cost 10x what they should!)& it will change the driver we are using, so since 'handle' is indicative of some s/w somewhere dropping a variable generated by something (quite often a driver) I guess this has as much chance as anything !

Let us know how you get on, if only for reference, I dunno whats causing this

[parsifal]

Let us know how you get on, if only for reference, I dunno whats causing this

After several uptime hours (a total of a couple of days) and few reboots the printer still seems to be working fine via USB port. I hope it stays that way this time. After switching to a USB cable XP just installed a new printer, but didn't ask for any new drivers, and it seems to have installed Canon's own drivers.

Well... we'll see how it goes from here.
Thanks for all your efforts. It's really nice to have such benevolent folks around.

[confus-ed]

So you are welcome & lets hope it stays fixed this time !

[al1937]

I had searched just about every forum fro a fix. I tried all the suggested fixes to no avail.
I had recently upgraded my free avg from ver. 8 to ver. 9 .

S0, I uninstalled AVG 9.0, uninstalled my Lex x6100 driver software, deleted my printer, ran several regstry cleaners.
Disconnected my printer from the USB port. Restarted Windows XP Pro, created a system restore just to have it in this setup state.
Printer still not connected.
Ran my printer install software.
During the installation it say to be sure all printer cables are connected and if a windows install hardware pops up,
CANCEL IT!
That's what happened and I canceled it and clicked continue until all drivers were install. ( I did need to insert my Windows XP Pro setup disk to install a certain file and also go to WINDOW/System32/drivers to install one other file).
Restarted Widows. EUREKA!
No more "handle is not valid"
I am assuming that AVG 9.0 thinks that one or more of my printer driver files were viruses.
I reinstalled the older version of AVG. So far so good.