Can't add printer on Windows XP

Question

I've added a HP 4250 printer to about half a dozen Windows XP PCs in our office without any problems whatsoever, but for some reason I haven't been able to add it to one particular PC today.

I go through the Add Printer wizard to add a local printer attached to the PC, enter the new port number as a Standard TCP/IP Port, install the driver. At the end of the wizard I get the following error message:

Full error message: "windows cannot connect to the printer. either the printer name was typed incorrectly, or the specified printer has lost its connection to the server."

This doesn't make any sense as I am able to ping the printer from the PC. The print spooler is running, and any firewall software on the local PC is switched off.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem, and came to the conclusion the problem was with the printer driver. I was using the HP Universal print driver, and I think it did not install properly or was corrupted in some way. You might find that switching to a more "generic" PCL 5 driver, say perhaps the HP 5N PCL5 printer driver, might work better...

Answer 2

I wasn't able to fix the problem. So I mapped the the user to another printer as a workaround