New
#1
Disappearing Printer Drivers
Having not found anything relevant by doing a forum search, herewith my plaint:
Several months ago, when I wanted to print something, an error message indicated that there was no printer driver installed, and a look at Devices and Printers in the Control Panel showed that to be correct. (There might have been one printer shown, I"m not certain.) A restart of the printer found all eight drivers available; a single instance, apparently.
Unfortunately, it has now happened twice over the past few weeks. Both the LaserJet and the OfficeJet worked perhaps thirty hours ago, and no changes made since that time. A short while ago, no LaserJet driver; Devices and Printers showed only the same driver that was there a few weeks ago when the same problem occurred, the OfficeJet driver. Both times, a restart of the computer restored all drivers, the others being fax drivers, a Quicken driver, a PaperPort driver, etc.
Computer is self-standing, non-networked, Home Premium 32-bit, no known poltergeists.
Curiously, after printing a while ago, after the restart, the Action Center icon appeared, so I clicked on it to open the Action Center, which stated that no problems had been reported, but as I was about to close it, the "problem chaser" started, and eventually reported that the FireFox plug-in container process had crashed four times, including once today. (That is a somewhat known problem, as this new part of Firefox is known to not yet be totally reliable.) I don't know how nor if a crash of that sort could remove my printer drivers.
A brief look at the Event Viewer did not show me anything, but I'm not at all certain where in the Viewer I should be looking, nor for what I ought to look.
Any `brilliant' (or other) thoughts on how to track down and fix this?