Windows 7: HP 990 printer black text problem

Well suddenly my old but extremely reliable 990 seems to print black text with a shadow on the left side of most black text I try to print whether it's mixed graphics and text or just text.
Been searching all over and can't find any definitive answers so figured I'd ask here and see if anyone has run into this before and figured it out.
I tried manually cleaning the cart, another cart, etc but it still seems to do it and used to print nice and extremely crisp text in best mode.
I'm beginning to think maybe the printer is just about worn out/done, but matbe I'm missing something easy that would fix it.

If you still have the program that came with the HP 990 their should be a clean/align/adjust section. Also many printers won't work properly if a usable color cartage isn't also installed.

I do BUT it's not included in win 7 and I have to run a virtual XP machine to get the old drivers and functions like ink level and all the extras.
I'm trying disabling all the shadow text and windows stuff to see if that makes it happy right now but getting tired of wasting paper doing test prints, plus ink I don't need to burn up.
My mom has a old 960 printer that uses the same carts and print engine so I might try it to eliminate a bad printer issue.
I have cleaned and alined it many times now so just grasping at any ideas I might have missed.

Normally you will not have any luck trying to force old hardware to work with Windows 7. Just have a little ceremony for the old printer. Thanking it for the many years of service and get a new printer that is Windows 7 ready. The old printer will understand and the new printer will try to give you the great service the old printer did.

Well yes but it did work perfectly fine as far as printouts go even with 64, text and color and the duplexer included worked too but now it doesn't so just trying to find out if there's any tweaks I can make to bring it back to where it was.
The built in driver for 7 works, just doesn't have all the cool extras and toolbox XP does and I can run the XP in a box to use those even.
The ink for it is pretty cheap in generics and the carts hold a LOT of ink compared to all the new HP's and everybody else's who have decided to give you tiny carts so you have to constantly buy expensive new ones.
I have other printers of course but this one used to have the nicest plain paper text and photo printout of all the printers I own and it's the only one that can automatically print double sided.

OK, now my last color cart ran out of red ink so bummer but I noticed on my last print test page that it shadows I'm getting slightly to the left of the regular black ink is color. it's showing mostly green so the printer is trying to overlay some color to get the text exactly the right shade or something and they aren't aligned with each other. So any other ideas now that I've figured that one out. I seem to remember there was a way besides print B/W only to make black text only use the black cart. Anway thanks for any other ideas.

I do believe even when print black and white is selected a proper working color cartage must be install. I don't know of any way around that.

yeah, it doesn't like having a missing color but it works, just that the B/W text is shaded towards the working colors now. Pretty sure if I remove the dead cart then it wont work.
My mom has a HP 960 that still works we think and she doesn't need it so going to get it and see if it works OK with my carts installed. It uses the same print engine and carts and everything just is slower, I can even install my duplexor on it. If it works OK maybe something in mine has gone away and I'll work on picking up a low mile used one somewhere and have spare parts.
I HAD a extra one that was given to me by a customer at work but had to leave it at my old house when I bought a new house and didn't have time or room to take everything I've collected over the years.

Well seeing how both my color carts died I ordered two new ones while we were trying to figure this problem out and today they showed up.
I put one of my old ones in the 960 mom gave me and exactly the same problem so now I figured maybe the carts have a issue. Put the new one in the 960 and printed a pretty nice test page so I put it in my 990 and now the black text is fine again. I guess the color carts DO overlay exactly with the black and if they are slightly messed up you get the wide text and offset color text I was getting.
I really didn't want to have to replace it because of all the working special features it has so a happy camper again. The cart I was using had worked just fine for a while, no text problems, and suddenly all these issues cropped up so I didn't think it could have been suddenly bad but it was.
I guess if you have a older HP printer that suddenly prints fat or off set color on the text try a known good cart first just in case.

See if this HP Win 7 Driver site does you any good. Hewlett Packard DeskJet 990C Printer Drivers