Unable to print anytihing after installing pdf printer

juhasnow · 16 Sep 2015

My printer: Samsung M2026W
My PDF-printers: Cute PDF Creator, Foxit Advanced PDF Editor

I have a serious problem with printing. All my printers have previously worked fine. But after installing a pdf-printer Cute PDF Creator or Foxit Advanced PDF Editor, all printing attemps will fail. I tried unistalling & installing all printers I have. Even Microsoft XPS-printer won`t work.

When I try to print from Word, nothing happens (Samsung, PDF and XPS). Sometimes Word even crashes. When I try to print from Excel, windows 7 gives a notification: current printer is not available, choose another printer (language is in finnish). WIth Mozilla Firefox I get a nofication: Printer not working/ An error occurred while printing). I have tried this with in all printing options (Samsung, PDF and XPS).

This problem first occurred two months ago. I googled a lot and tried even to empty registyy etc. But the only way I could fix this was to get registry backup from a time before I fisrt tried to install a pdf-printer. Unfortunately, after the registry backup was restored, several other problems started to raise with other programs. This is obvious because the registry backup was very old (6 months).

So I re-installed whole windows 7 home premium 64-bit. I even formatted my harddrive (2.0 Gb) to get a clean start. Now I finally have everything re-istalled and working perfectly. Samusung M2026W was working fine. But immediatelly after I installed PDF-printer (this time Foxit Anvanced PDF Editor) precisely same problem occurred. Thi is my curse. Of course I took backup files of the whole system and registry. But that is not the solution, I want to be able print dircetly to pdf. I used to avoid this problem by printing first to xps-file and then converting the xps-file to pdf. But if you have several files, this is really time comsuming.

I also have Windows Vista 32-bit in my laptop, and all pdf-printers are working just fine.

Please help me. This must be a software issue because at first everything is working fine and in the next minute everything will fail.

PS. This picture shows error which occurs everytime I install CutePDF, immediatelly after installation. I have only one user in WIN7 and I have full administration rights, I have checked this multiple times.

juhasnow · 17 Sep 2015

Update:

I fixed the problem temporarely by doing full windows restore from backup file from external harddrive. All printers (Samsung and XPS) are now functioning fine. I decided NOT to install previously tested PDF-printers.

Instead I got Adobe Acrobat XI Professional which installs PDF-plugins directly to Office and browsers. After installing Adobe, printing to pdf from Word and Excel works. There is also an option to save the file directly to pdf without going throught printing option.

I have created a solution for my problem. But I am not happy because there is some serious issues with pdf printers in my setup. It may have something to do with UAC. Some pdf printers will change windows registry in a way that all printing will fail. And these actions are irreversible. As far as I known the only fix is to get system restore from time before the install. So a word of advice: update your sytem restore files often, especially if you are plannig to add a pdf-printer.

cyclops · 18 Sep 2015

Did you install Cute PDF as an admin and did you happen to look at the printer port configurations after installing that? I use Cute and Adobe on Win xp and 7 never have had a problem on at least 10 computers.

juhasnow · 19 Sep 2015

Yes, I installed CutePDF with full admin rights. I have only one user and it is an admin. It is very strange that both pdf-printers (CutePDF and Foxit) gave an error immediatelly after installation that installation was not completed fully because I don`t have admin rights.

What means printer port configuration? I checked from devices that all ports (COM and LPT1) are working and drivers are up-to-date. From printer properties I checked that ports are assigned as they should be wiith common sense.

sdowney717 · 19 Sep 2015

looking for a PDF printer. Printer dialog will then print to PDF
I found only 4 that worked well for my setup.

PDF24, PDFCreator, Bullzip, doPDF8 are all working with no watermarks.

cyclops · 23 Sep 2015

juhasnow, post a screenshot of the printer ports as found under printer properties, see attachment. PDF printing does not use LPT or COM ports

juhasnow · 24 Sep 2015

Here is the picture. I`m sorry but the language is Finnish. Here are few translation: "paikallinen"=local, "tavallinen"=standard, "tulosta tiedostoon"=print to file.

Samsung uses wlan-port, adobe-pdf two different ports. There is also four COM and three LPT ports as well but these are NOT showing in the picture and these are unused. There is no problem at the moment.

If I remember correctly, CutePDF was using a local port. If I install CutePDF, I don`t know what will happen to the port configuration. But I`m not willing to do so because full system restore is most likely needed, again. As I said previously, if something would go wrong with printing ports/configuration, I would assume that removing ALL printing devides and re-installing them again would make at least one of them work. But that was not the case with my setup.

cyclops · 24 Sep 2015

I think part of the problem is with ports name Desktp\*.pdf and Documents\*.pdf
Compare with what I sent to you
Create new ports and follow the same naming

juhasnow · 24 Sep 2015

Ports like Desktop\*.pdf and Documents\*.pdf are not the problem because these ports did not exist in the original setup when I installed CutePDF. These ports came with Adobe Pro, which is working perfectly. I even think that the reason why Adobe works but CutePDF or Foxit won`t is that Adobe uses different type of port configuration.

The original problem is partly solved because I have a working pdf-printer (Adobe Pro). And because I won`t risk the stability of my system, I won`t install any other pdf-printer. Therefore I cannot continue the troubleshooting of errors which don`t exist anymore.

I thank you of your assistance.

cyclops · 24 Sep 2015

Peace to you. Good job!