Printing from Firefox or IE crashes my computer.

Avoriaz

Hi, I have a Samsung ML-4500 mono laser printer. It is about 4 or 5 years old and was working perfectly until I reinstalled Windows XP and all software from scratch on a new laptop disk.

I installed the printer driver using the original CD, did a few test prints from Word and everything seemed fine with the printer.

The printer works fine if I print from Word.

However, if I try and print from Firefox or IE, the computer crashes. I get a blue screen:

A problem has been detected and windows has shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

Bad_Pool_Error

Etc etc

I have tried removing and reinstalling the driver. I have downloaded the latest driver from Samsung.

This has not solved the problem.

Why is the printer working normally if I print from Word but crashing if I try and print from Firefox or IE?

Surely, if I was trying to print outside the margins of the paper or something like that I would just get a warning message, not a blue screen crash.

I still have the original laptop disk that I used for four years. If I put that back into the laptop, then the printer works fine and will print from Word, Firefox or anything that I ask it to do. There is nothing wrong with the printer.

The only difference I can see is that the new hard disk has a fresh install with XP Service Pack 3. The old disk only has Service Pack 2.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks

latecomer

Have you updated all your motherboard drivers since re-installing? Definitely worth doing as the problem could be a USB issue rather than a browser/printer one.

Have you tried re-installing on the new drive but only to SP2?

Good luck!

Avoriaz

All the motherboard drivers have been updated to the latest Dell spec.

The printer attaches via a parallel port and not USB.

I suppose I could remove SP3 and revert to SP2 but I don’t really want to do that if it can be avoided.

What is in SP3 that might cause me a problem?

I hardly ever print from Firefox or IE so it isn’t really a major problem, just something I would like to get fixed just in case I need to do it again sometime.

Thanks

iviv

In the bluescreen, did it give a series od numbers in this form:
0x00000000 (00000000, 00000000, 00000000, 00000000)

Where the 0's could be any letter/number. If so, the ones outside the brackets could be helpful. You should be able to see the details in the Event log.

dazzc

This might be a workaround to your problem.

Download cutePDF (its free). Install it as per the instruction.
When you want to print from firefox or IE, just click file, then print then select cuteODF as your printer. It will save your chosen print project as a PDF file, then print it from there like normal