Yep, that's right Ed. Welcome to the wonderful world of HP print software. The Easy Printer Care doesn't do anything that isn't done in the Printer Utility. Its as worthless as &*%$ on a boar hog (southern expression ).
You can feel better by simply deleting the shortcut icons for EPC and just use PU (which is a heck of an acronym - I wonder who at HP thinks these names up? )
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I know about the boar hog...I'm a southern mountaineer (or hillbilly, if you prefer.)
Okay, I got my computer fixed, at least it seems that way. First off, the main problem I was having was I kept getting a "spooler subsystem app" crash. This is the XP printer driver system, based on spoolsv.exe (I THINK.) Anyway, I found some resources on Mickeysoft's site. Here they are:
[a href=\"http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;324757]http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;324757[/url]
and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312052I tried both of these to no avail. However, it was only when I used them in combination that I could get things going again.
So, the first thing I did was to get all HP software off my machine. That inclues going into C:/windows/system32 and deleting the spooler stuff as in those pages. I also deleted any HP folders from Program Files, as the HP uninstall does not do this.
THEN, I went into the registry and deleted every reference to HP, Hewlett, Designjet that I could find (I'm not sure this is a necessary step, especially if you have a good registry scanner that will eliminate them.) I then proceeded to the steps listed in the first link above (the Spooler subsystem app problem.) I did everything it said, but it didn't work. Then, I looked at the spoolsv.exe page and found some additional info about deleting stuff from both:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Print\Printers
I then found that I did not have a "ControlSet001", but I had "ControlSet002, ControlSet003, ControlSet004" files. So, I did everything to each of them that I was told to do for ControlSet001. Rebooted, reinstalled the Z3100 and did a repair (reinstall) of P.U. Pulled up PS CS3 and printed any size I wanted, no spooler crash and it seems to be a lot faster pulling up the HP print preview screen.
I might also mention that I always use a print preview. It avoids wasting paper if you have a setting wrong, you can see it before you actually print. One thing I found was that the spooler problem seemed to be related to the HP print preview, in that I got no crashes when I went directly to print. However, I did not print anything out, since I wasn't into wasting paper--so I do not know if it would actually print correctly.
WHEW. It was a tough day trying to figure this one out. I'm behind! But, maybe I've helped someone get going again.
Ed