Problem: Connecting to HP Photosmart C5550 over Network

** THIS PROBLEM HAS BEEN SOLVED, PLEASE SEE SOLUTION BELOW **

Hello,

I'm not sure where exactly to post this (either here or Hardware and Devices), but since it involves a network, I figure this is more appropriate.

I'm unable to wirelessly print to my HP Photosmart C5550 printer that's on my home network.

Here's my set-up: I have a Windows 7 Home Premium x86 Compaq desktop computer that is my network hub. The printer is hard-wired to it, and this hub computer can print to it just fine. My wife has a Windows XP Home MSI netbook that sends the print jobs wirelessly to the hub computer; the netbook can print just fine. The problem lies with my Windows 7 Home Premium x64 HP laptop. For some reason, I can see the printer on our network and supposedly connect to it. When it comes to printing, however, it immediately throws an error. From Word, it says "Windows cannot print due to a problem with the current printer setup." Printing a test page after connecting yields no test page and no error message.

Here's what I've tried so far: The laptop can see the printer on my hub computer. File and printer sharing is turned on, both on the hub and the laptop. Password protected sharing is turned off both on the hub and the laptop. Sharing is activated for the printer on the hub. I added the x64 drivers to auto-install upon connection to the printer over a network in Advanced Sharing. I looked for threads here that could potentially solve the problem, hopefully in the right places. I even went so far as to hard-wire the printer to my laptop, install the printer and its software (to get the drivers), re-attach the printer to the hub, and then install the networked version of the printer. All to no avail.

Oh, I've also contacted HP tech support, but seeing as so far they keep sending me instructions (first in text, later in videos) that simply have me add the printer the way I tried to do it the first time (going on a dozen times now), I'm starting to get more than a little frustrated and feeling hopeless.

Any ideas? Do I need to uninstall the printer software? Might that be interfering with things? Do I need to set up a Homegroup and share the printer that way, or can I even do that? (I haven't taken too deep a look at these aspects of Win7 yet.) Or is there something I'm messing up on, or something HP tech support isn't telling me?

I really do appreciate the help, so thanks in advance.

~Jonathan

P.S. Printing remotely like this worked in Vista (one of the only things in Vista that worked for me).