"Devices & Printers" Completely Hangs - Nothing Appears

[SGREENE978]

Good morning. I've read an older thread that a particular installed printer does not appear in Devices & Printers. And I tried all the recommendations there. However, as the thread title states. we suddenly lost the ability to have Devices & Printers run to completion. In our case, the green line crawls across the dialogue box, but never completes and the box remains empty.

I've attempted the suggestions in Services to set Bluetooth to Start and Automatic. I also made sure the same was true for the Print Spooler. I then attempted to uninstall the printer drivers, but there's a problem with that, too. Though the system acts as though it's trying to remove the driver, it never does and I'm unable to uninstall any of the other HP printer drivers.

On top of that, I'm unable to print to the XMS printer. I've tried, but it hangs the page and I'm forced to end the process. In Device Driver, the printer which is an HP Officejet 6500 E709, does appear when I select, "View - Hidden Items."

On Thursday 7/23/15, I allowed the latest "critical" Windows update to install with the hope that it might correct the error. Nada! So I've basically run out of ideas as what else I can do, short of resetting Windows. I'd truly appreciate any help or advice.
Thanks & Enjoy your weekend.
SG

 

[GokAy]

Get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware free (enable rootkit scanning - settings - detections) and scan with it.

Then if clean , try disabling Windows Defender.
Also see if it is working in Safe Mode.

Also run cmd as admin and enter:

sfc /scannow

then after it is finished and restarted, enter in cmd:

findstr /c:"[SR]" %windir%\logs\cbs\cbs.log >"%userprofile%\desktop\sfcdetails.txt"

attach the sfcdetails.txt here

 

[SGREENE978]

A Good Try - No Positive Results

GokAy - Thank you for your recommendations. I follow each one through. The only small bit of good news is that I was able to run Devices & Printers in Safe Mode, but it would not allow me to add a printer. It told me the Print Spooler wasn't running. I then went back into Services and re-Started the Spooler and set it to Automatic.

Then I ran the second scan from the CMD and it found nothing.

I'm not sure what else to do except for backing data up and perform a reset.

The pictures are below

Thanks again,
Steve

 

[GokAy]

2nd command only works if you have run the 1st one. You have to do them in order, but seeing sfc /scannow found no errors, there is no need for the 2nd one.

Safe Mode was for testing to see if you could see the devices (too many services shut down in Safe Mode to install them).

Try a clean startup (disable everything in startup and all non-MS services, even firewall and AV) but please disconnect from the Internet - turn off router. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ation-conflicts-performing-clean-startup.html