Often when printing to my HP Photosmart 2610 printer the following message appears “The print spooler was unable to connect to your printer. This can be caused by your printer being turned off, the cable being unplugged, or being connected to a VPN, which will block your access to your local network”. I know that the first two suggestions are not correct, as the printer is turned on and the cable is definitely connected. This error can delay printing from the computer for a few hours or even days! Sometimes a restart of the computer fixes the problem, but most often this does not. Interestingly enough, my laptop (which is networked to the desktop computer through a wireless router) is not affected by this problem when printing to the HP Photosmart 2610. Both computers are running Windows XP SP2.

From your description I assume that the HP Photosmart 2610 printer is locally connected to your desktop computer (via USB or like) and the printer is being shared on your desktop computer, allowing your laptop to also print to the Photosmart printer over your network. When researching your question I found many other users experiencing the same problem. However, it seems this problem is also quite prevalent in enterprise environments which are running a print server, and the suggestions to resolve the problem in this context were not particularly relevant, since your printer is locally connected to a computer rather than operating as a networked printer. That said, there are still several avenues we can pursue to investigate and resolve the problem you are experiencing.

As a starting point, we need to determine what is the print spooler service, and why this is creating problems when you are attempting to print. The print spooler service is a service in Windows which manages all the print jobs which are sent to the printer. The print spooler service also allows users to exert some control over the printing process, such as deleting jobs waiting to be printed in the print queue. As you can see, since the spooler service manages the printing process it is important that this service is running to enable printing on the computer. Some users have reported that third-party firewall packages could be blocking the spooler service from communicating with Windows, resulting in the aforementioned error message appearing. If you are running any third-party firewall software (such as ZoneAlarm, McAfee, Norton, or like) then try temporarily disabling the firewall software to check whether the problem persists. If this fixes the problem, you may need to modify the firewall settings to allow communication between Windows and the print spooler service. The exact procedure for this will depend on the firewall software which you are running, so if you need further advice on this matter please contact me again. Alternatively, you could try searching Google for the name of your firewall software together with “print spooler” as it would be highly likely that other users have also experienced the same issue.

Should a third-party firewall not be blocking the print spooler service, the next possibility is that a print job is trapped in the spooler and causing grief. To eliminate this potential cause we will try stopping the print spooler service, manually clearing the spooler and then restarting the spooler to check whether the problem persists. Go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel”. Open the “Administrative Tools” control panel (you may need to first click the “Performance and Maintenance” category) and then open “Services”. Find the “Print Spooler” service and click “Stop the service”. Once the service has stopped, open Windows Explorer or My Computer. We first need to enable the display of hidden files and folders, so we can find the print spooler directory. Go to the “Tools” menu > “Folder Options”. In the Folder Options window that appears, click the “View” tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders”. Click OK to save and close. Navigate to the following location: C:WindowsSystem32spoolPRINTERS. If there are any files in this directory delete all those files. Once this has been done, go back into the Services administrative tools control panel, select the “Print Spooler” service and restart the service by clicking “Start the service”. Check whether the problem continues.

If the problem does continue, you should next try reinstalling the printer using the latest drivers from the HP website. As the first step, delete the printer from your computer by going to the “Start” menu > “Printers and Faxes”. Right-click on the HP Photosmart 2610 printer and select “Delete”. Click “Yes” in the confirmation window”. Then, open the Windows Control Panel and then “Add or Remove Programs”. Uninstall any HP printer software which is installed on your computer. Once this has completed, restart the computer. Now we need to reinstall the latest version of the HP printer software. Go to the HP website (www.hp.com.au) and click the “Software & Driver Downloads” link. Search for “Photosmart 2610” and download the latest drivers for Microsoft Windows XP. Once these have downloaded, install the drivers and check whether the problem continues.

Next, try updating your computer to Windows XP Service Pack 3. There could be some kind of conflict or corrupt file within your installation of Windows, and perhaps an upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 3 will resolve this issue. To update your installation of Windows, open Internet Explorer and go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com . Windows Update should automatically detect that your installation of Windows requires the Service Pack 3 update, and prompt you to commence the installation.

As a last resort, if you are unable to resolve this problem through any other methods, you could bypass the print spooler all together. Instead of sending the print job to the Windows spooler to manage and queue the print job, you can set Windows to send the job directly to the printer and bypass the spooler. To do this, go to the “Start” menu > “Printers and Faxes”. Right-click on your printer and select “Properties”. In the properties window that appears, you should notice that “Spool print documents so program finishes printing faster” is enabled. This means that the print jobs are being sent to the Windows spooler, so the program which requested the print job (e.g. Microsoft Word) does not need to wait for the print job to be completed before continuing operation. To make the computer send print jobs directly to the printer, bypassing the Windows print spooler, enable the option “Print directly to the printer”. Click “Apply” and then OK to save the changes. Now try printing to check whether this workaround has resolved the problem. Please be aware, that as we are bypassing the print spooler your applications will take longer to respond after submitting a print job (as it needs to wait for the job to be printed from the printer). As such, this is more of a workaround rather than a solution, and I would encourage you to continue to look for a more permanent solution to the problem.