A few months ago I bought a USB Canon BJC 3000 printer. Everything worked fine for a few weeks, until it refused to print, giving the message ‘There was an error writing to USBPRN01 for the printer. Cannot access the port. It may be in use by another program. Quit other programs and try again’. On investigation I found that the printer was no longer registered through the Device Manager USB Controllers (in the ‘System’ control panel). I reinstalled the printer software and it then printed without any problems. However, the same problem reoccurs every 3 - 4 weeks. It is easy to fix, but a pain in the neck. The USB connection appears steady enough at both the printer and PC ends. I am running Windows 98. Do you have any explanation/cure?

I have been looking around the internet to see if I can find a problem even remotely like the one you are experiencing. However, I have had no luck. It seems that your problem is unique to your computer system! I think that we can eliminate a faulty USB cable as the cause because the problem reoccurs within a general time period and you can print perfectly when the printer is operational. I did find reference on Microsoft Knowledge Base to a problem with USB printers not printing under Windows 98. There is a fix but this is only available to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent hardware vendors (IHVs). The idea is that the driver manufacturer obtains the patch and then release a new version of their updated drivers with the patch integrated. For this reason, I suggest that you download the latest drivers for your printer from the page www.canon.com.au/products/printers/colour_bj_printers/bjc3000_drivers.html at the Canon website. It seems that the most recent drivers are ‘Canon BJ Driver (incl status monitor) v6.63′. This package contains the drivers for the BJC 3000/6xxx/8200 series of printers and is 11.5mb in size. Remember that you will need to uninstall your existing drivers before installing these. Also, make sure that you keep your old drivers on hand in case the newer drivers don’t work. Unfortunately I am out of any other ideas. Please let me know how this turns out and, as always, if any other readers have suggestions for Frank, please write in. I also apologise to Frank for the delay in responding to his question.