Hello,
I'm running Win7Pro64SP1 on a Z800 workstation, and recently had a partial disk crash in which a few sectors went into oblivion - after disk repair etc. and a few reinstalls, most everything came back ok, but here and there I still do stumble on a corrupted dll that needs replacement.
Today I saw that Adobe Reader was unable to print on my OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus, which is on the ethernet LAN. Never had a problem with Reader before... so I reinstalled everything for Reader but to no avail, even though Wordpad prints without a glitch and I can scan with the printer (i.e. communication with it is not an issue). So I installed the latest All-In-One driver for the printer... but still no success. Then I run the "HP Print and Scan Doctor" application which told me that everything was absolutely FINE... except that when I tried to print the test page, nothing came out from the printer. But the "Doctor" gave me the opportunity to print an "Internal test page"... and that one printed ok!!
Then I noticed this: each time I tried to print from a 64bit application (like Wordpad), everything went fine... but for 32bit applications (e.g. Adobe Reader) the printer is invisible! We are in software development business and have 32 and 64 bit versions of everything we do, so I tried to print from one of our software in Java: the 64bit version printed ok, but the 32bit version of exactly the same jar just gave me
java.awt.print.PrinterException: No printer found.
So clearly, (1) the printer is ok, (2) the communication with it is ok, but (3) the printer "doesn't exist" in 32 bits, although it is fine in 64 bits! So I obviously tried to install at least the basic 32bit drivers for the printer... but was adviced to install the 64bit version instead (which I already did, with succes).
I know that drivers (like printer drivers) are dlls, and that you can't mix different bitness in the same image, but given the number of applications that still exist in 32 bits only, I thought that the 64bit All-In-One installer (OJ8600_1315.exe) would install both 63 AND 32 bit drivers??
Any idea on how I can make 32bit apps aware of the printer, too?
Many thanks for your advice!