HP Director is possessed by evil spirits

I am looking for some advice in dealing with some real weirdness. I was trying to help my girl friend with her PC at work. (Small office, no IT). She couldn't get HP Director to open.

The PC is a HP running MS XP Pro and 2007 Apps. The printer is a HP Officejet J4680c AI1 using a Bluetooth connection. I couldn't reload Director because she doesn't have the disk and you can't download it from HP for this model.

The printer prints fine and scans if you use the XP utility. So the printer functions and is connected. But, if you double click Director nothing happens. I did read about a number of problems with IE7 (IE8 is on this PC) interfering with HP Director. I tried one of the suggestions.

You double click HP Director, then hit Alt/Space and get a pop-up, click 'minimize' and you have HP Director minimized in the tray. Click the minimized HP Director and the HP Director screen opens, only there are no icons - its just empty. So HP Director is there, but is just a ghost - it's invisible and has no substance.

I go back to the days of 9-pin printers and dos commands where taking a day to get a printer to work wasn't that unusual, but I thought we had progressed. This has become a challenge and I'd appreciate any thoughts (other than go buy her a new printer.)

Gary

 

Have you downloaded the 2nd item listed here?
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?os=228&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&product=3692888&lang=en

If that doesn't work, further down is a link to purchase a CD.
I have purchased several CDs from HP.

 

Thank you. I'll try it. I feel a bit dumb. I was only looking at the J4680c. I believe the J4680 is basically the same printer. I'll try reinstalling the software today.