Windows 7: ?? Chrome prints what IE9 Cannot?? HP printer drivers?

This is a bizarre problem I've never seen in longer than I care to confess to.
Windows 7 Home Prem, 64-bit, no malware etc. In the past, everything the user needed worked fine. Then "out of the blue", could no longer print Bank statements which had been no problem in the past. IE9 and the HP printer no longer cooperated - the printout did not by any means match the Print Preview - what printed was essentially one or two 'frames' of the web page, with the bulk being blank.

uninstalled the HP printer, picked latest driver wad, reinstalled. Since Chrome is quite different [and I know my way around it] installed that, as debug tool.
in between, cleared everything - cookies, temp files, etc etc etc.

Chrome CAN print the desired info just fine. IE9 Still cannot print the blasted page/s. I get the 'header' frame that is above the statement frame but nothing else.

Strangest of all to me is that, 2 weeks or so AFTER the problem originally cropped up, for no reason we can track, the printer spit out a bunch of pages that are the individual frames of the web page/s in question. none were "whole pages" as one would view on the display, but individual subsections.... spit out one after another wasting a lot of time/paper/ink.....



I am completely baffled. I want to think this is as simple as a font-handling problem, but one would think if that were the case, at least the ornamentation of the frame would print or be obvious on each page's layout, but that is not the case. When printed via the Chrome browser, two things stand out:
- the page prints "as you see it" - no issues so far as I can see
- The PRINTER interface that pops up when I hit the "printer icon" displayed partway down on the page, that interface is DIFFERENT than the one that pops up when one uses IE9. That surprises me. Why would the printer's GUI be distinct from one browser to another???

help....

Bump! I could really use an extra brain or two. I see some posts around the web that are similar to this and the implication is something twisted about Javascript?

When you select Print Review in IE9, do all the pages show up blank?
Did you by any chance perform a disk cleanup before this occured?

everything looks lovely in preview. it all prints lovely via chrome.
no disk cleanup.

I had a chat with a friend who is quite the guru - runs a medium-size shop and he gave me an earful about things that can cause this. I have/had already tried compatibility view - no change. the one thing I still don't know is whether there is a later driver rev for the particular HP printer - its an older photosmart C4650. I tried two different drivers for it that were months apart dated in 2005 and 2006 - there is a hairball out there on the hp support site that is marked 2010 and I tried to install that - in other words, it APPEARED to install, but resulted in a driver detail still showing that old date so I am wondering if Windows 7 was busy installing something that was already in the system32 folder while the hp install routine was running... but one would think you would get an error message. i got none. I need to crack that big *.exe and unpack just the drivers and see if I can force install something more modern. my friend said that HP had an applet - it may be the "Smart web printing" thing that was supposed to help with just this sort of thing but in his view was problematic. had something to do with intercepting the print job, converting it so the printer could actually deal with it. I really wish I could get this guy to either A) get a better, modern printer, or, B) just use Chrome [better modern browser]. but it bugs me that something upset the apple cart and I can't figure out exactly what did..

I did not know it at the time, but before I posted this OP, problem was solved.
How?
Installation of Chrome, and a full restart/reboot.

I do not mean "use Chrome instead" [which is what I would personally do....]. What I mean is that Chrome changes the default HTML handling in Windows 7 registry. someone with better tech vocabulary probably knows the exact registry keys that are altered. An IT director friend explained it ... So even in IE9, the default HTML settings are then altered.
the result is that what would not print previously is printing fine now.

or there is some other issue at work...