Disappearing printers

[Dralliw]

Wasn't really sure where to post this...

Periodically, one of the users on our network loses her printers. It happened again this morning - she had been printing reports from an Access database (Office 2000) right along, then a "spool32.exe caused an illegal operation in kernel32", and of course Access stops responding. I looked in the printers folder, and there's suddenly nothing but the add printer icon. The printer the reports go to is an HP 5si - upgraded from a 4si last month, and we've also got a Genicom 3810 on the parallel port. The pc is a fic mobo, 766 cely, whitebox. NT 4.0 server running the network.

The MS knowledge base didn't seem to show any pertinent info. Anybody got ideas?

TIA

[Darkstar]

Good ol' spool32! I'm guessing she's running 9x. Once spool32 crashes, your printers do disappear usually until you reboot.

Are you using McAfee? There are know problems with it and spooling. I think if you exclude all the spool files and folders and such from being scanned by McAfee it should be ok.

I've also found that changing the printer spool settings to "print directly to printer" fixes the problem more often than not. Do that for all printers.

[Dralliw]

Yup, win98se, meant to mention that.

Hearing that printers normally disappear with spool32 errors helps - I was looking at it as a "chicken or egg" problem.

We actually aren't using Macafee anymore, we moved to Norton 2002.

Of course it's just one user out of 30, so she thinks I did something to her computer intentionally.
Thanks for the info, Darkstar.

[Darkstar]

Yeah, if problems are system-wide they're your fault and if they're isolated to one machine it's your fault, but with personal intent.