Cannot Add Printer

Hello everyone,

A few days ago, I still had two printers that showed up under "Printers and Faxes" in the Control Panel. Now, it's completely empty and only shows "Add Printer"

When I click on "Add Printer" it tells me "Operation could not be completed." I've tried using the driver CD's that came with the printers to try and reinstall them, but nothing is working.

I am running Windows XP, and I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop. I have included a hijackthis.txt file (even though I'm not sure if that's necessary).

Thanks in advance for anyone's help.

Beenieman

 

Are you trying to add Networked printers, or a printer directly connected to said computer? If networked, can you browse to the computer they are connected to and see the Shares?

 

I'm trying to print directly to a printer, that's not on a network.

Now, I followed the steps that Halo suggested, and it doesn't show any "spooler" So, what is my next move?

Thanks

Beenieman

 

Sorry, I tried to edit my last message, but it didn't work. It does show "Print Spooler" However, when i try to start it, it says, "Could not start the print spool service on Local Computer. Error 1068: The dependency service or group failed to start. By the way, my printers are connected correctly and were working fine just a few days ago.

Thanks

Beenieman

 

Thanks for everyone's help. I solved the problem. By following Halo's directions and getting the Error 1068 message. I Google'd it, and followed the directions on this page:

http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/CleanPrinterDrivers.htm

I followed Step 14 and:

keyed the command: sc config spooler depend= RPCSS

Then, Step 15: restarted the print spooler

I now see the Printer Icons again.

I want to thank all of you for your quick response, and I know where I'm coming next time that I have a problem. I should have come here last week when my computer kept restarting but finally refused to load Windows.

I'm living temporarily in Colombia and I took it to a tech guy and he told me that the problem was in the hard drive. So, he reformatted my hard drive (even though had most of the data backed up, I still lost some new data that was very important).

After that, the computer still had the same problems and it wasn't possible for him to reinstall Windows XP. So, another tech guy looked at it, and told me the problem was probably in the memory. Sure enough, he replaced the memory and it was able to reload Windows XP.

Thanks again,

Beenieman