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One of our Enterprisey systems has a long-running batch process that sometimes get interrupted by the following popup dialog:

OpenCurPrinter: printer: \\FS3\HP30351st, port: Ne00:, drive: winspool
Error initializing the printer

(where \\fs3\HP...etc... is the path of one of our network printers)

Screenshot:

OpenCurPrinter dialog screenshot

I have seen a few ancient mentions of this 'OpenCurPrinter' dialog on the web, so I think its something to do with the Windows OS or printer drivers rather than the particular Enterprisey system that we are running the process in.

The OS is Windows XP and part of the batch process we are running involves emailing documents via Outlook/Exchange, if that makes any difference. Is this something to do with the way MS Office talks to printers even when its not printing?

Can anyone tell me where this dialog is coming from, and what I can do to stop it from appearing? (Its playing havoc with our batch processing)

Many thanks.

codeulike
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  • I suggest you forget bout the dialog, which is only a symptom, and look into the problem instead. The error message is pretty clear - Error initialising the printer. – John Gardeniers May 19 '11 at 10:56
  • But we're not printing anything. And we don't have control over the code - its an Enterprisey system. So we have to look at the symptoms unfortunately. – codeulike May 19 '11 at 11:01

1 Answers1

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When Outlook is using Word as the email editor, it enevitably needs access to the printer parameters of the default printer. To be exact: Word needs it to calculate page margins, which are of course useless for an email.

So you might try setting a local printer (like the Microsoft Document Image writer or a PDF printer) which is always available at low latencies as a workaround. Alternatively, just do not use Word as the email editor for Outlook.

the-wabbit
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