Word 2010 suddenly lost all printers and won't add them back

While I was printing a document on Word 2010 Monday (using a Dell studio s15z laptop), and the printer just stopped mid-job. Troubleshooting, I turned it off, rebooted the laptop -- and now Word has no printers, it has even lost the option to print to a pdf file through Adobe Acrobat. When I try to add a printer I get "The Active Domain Directory Services is currently unavailable". I can still see the printers in "Devices and Printers" and just downloaded a new driver for the printer I have here at work (an HP Laserjet 1018). I print via USB cable, not a network, and can still see other printers (available via network, which I don't use) when I try to add a device via the control panel. But Word sees nothing and refused to 'add'. What gives? (updating Adobe Acrobat didn't help either)

Addendum. I have a new tab labelled Acrobat and can indeed print to a pdf via that tab. So perhaps this is a driver issue after all?

Go into Devices and Printers and check which is your default printer. If you want to change it, just right-click the required printer icon and choose "Set as default printer".

Actually, HP had a general driver fix program that solved the issue, even though a driver specific to my printer did not. Great job HP! Problem solved.