HP All-in-One Printer Disappears  

I have a new HP G60-530US laptop with Windows 7 installed (less than 2 months old). It is connected to an HP 7410 All-in-One Printer and a Brother laser printer.

Three times now, the HP 7410 printer has mysteriously disappeared from the installed printers. The Brother printer does not disappear.

To re-install the HP 7410 printer requires disabling the AVS using the Services utility (not just shutting down the AVS (Panda)).

The printer driver works for a week or so, and then must be re-installed.

HP is clueless about the cause or cure for this.

The laptop people referred me to the printer support people and the printer support people referred me to the laptop support people. The last tech support guy suggested that I restore the system on the theory that if the problem persisted it would be a hardware problem and not a software problem. He seemed to miss the fact that the disappearing printer driver software only occured with HP printers.

HP technical support was worthless.

Does anyone have any suggestions to fix this?

Some internet forums suggest that this occurs when HP machines are connected to different networks. I noticed my problem occur after I took the laptop on a business trip and connected to a different wireless network.

In my experience, HP All-in-One printer software (e.g. the "Solution Center") is buggy and a resource hog, so I suspect that HP has not debugged their software to work with Windows 7.

Thanks, Kari.

On Vista forums, I've discovered that the disappearing HP printer drivers has been a problem for some time over a wide range of HP printers -- HP does nothing to fix the problem and its help desk techs seem unaware that this problem has been around for a while with Vista. HP techs allege that some of the software has become corrupt and the drivers must be re-installed or that the user must restore the system (and trash all your settings).

The solution identified on those forums is to stop and disable the HP CUE Device Discovery Service. Apparently, this service is used to detect HP printers and add them to the HP Solutions Center software.

In my experience, the HP printer disappears when my laptop comes into range of a "foreign" HP printer with wireless capabilities. For example, my laptop dropped my configured HP wireless printer when I went to an office that had a different wireless HP printer installed. The HP CUE service trashes the existing printer driver even though you do not intend to install and use the "foreign" printer. That would also explain why the printer drivers disappear when visiting a hotel or other location where any HP wireless devices exist. It would also explain why non-HP drivers do not disappear.

I've disabled the CUE Device Service (using the Services utility). I'll see if that works.

A patch from Microsoft or HP would be a big help to users if the number of posts on this issue are any indication of how pervasive this problem is.