Windows 7 - Please help, "Devices & Printers" not loading

Hello folks,

new to the forum and fairly new to Windows7 so please be patient with me

I have this very problem on my Dell XPS8100 with Windows 7 Home Premium, but ONLY on one of the user accounts. The admin, guest and another user account all loads "Devices & Printers" just fine. On the one user account where it does not work, I get the green progress bar going on forever and the window is never populated with Devices and Printers. As others have mentioned, the printer and all other devices (iPod, camera, etc.) works fine with ALL accounts.

I have been searching the web for several weeks (including this forum) and I believe I have tried all the solutions that have worked for many, but not for me:

- I activated the bluetooth service
- I played with turning on/off the spooler service
- I re-registered the I8 DLLs
- I run "sfc /scannow"
- I run check disk

What drives me crazy is that I can't figure out what is the difference between the user account not working and ALL others where the "Devices & Printer" panel loads perfectly!!!

Is there anything else that could be the cause of this? Short of a repair install, I do not know what else to do.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

It may be a corrupt user account.
Just save the data from that account and delete it.
Recreate the account.

pbcopter,

thanks, I have thought of that. However, I have few programs installed that refer to user-specific data directories (i.e.: Incredimail and a Kodak and Nikon program to transfer pictures). I need to find an easy way to "clone" those settings to another account without cloning the issue...

Incredimail in particular I expect to be annoying. I had LOTS of issues already in migrating it from our old XP computer to this new one with Windows 7. I personally hate Incredimail (bloated and poorly implemented, IMHO) but my wife uses it, so no option there, it has to work!

Take a look at this article.

Fix a corrupted user profile