Strange issue with Office 10

[Guest]

I have a customer who has a very strange issue that involves the following components: Savin 8020d (Ricoh Aficio 2020d), Windows 7 on a Dell XPS (64bit), and Office 2010 (64bit). The issue is that when he sets the Savin as the default printer, he cannot open any Office application without the busy circle coming up and running endlessly. He also cannot close this app down when this happens, nor can he do anything other than shutting his dell off and powering back up.

He can, however, choose his small desktop printer he used to print to as his default printer and open up any Office 2010 app just fine. He can then choose whatever he wants to print, choose the Savin printer, and print without an issue.

He was on the phone with Microsoft support for well over 3 hours yesterday, and they could not tell him what the issue was, but they "suspected" the issue was with the print driver and not the Office 2010 app itself.

I have been in contact with a Savin tech rep regarding this issue, and he has never heard of this issue occurring, and is going to do further research on it.

I personally believe that the9u issue lies not with the printer driver, but either with the particular machine or the 2010 app, but was hoping for some insight from any of you fine folks who may have any ideas or suggestions.

Thanks for your time in reading this rather long-winded post.

Edit: Sorry, I forgot to add that he has the correct PCL and PS printer drivers for Windows 7 64bit(Ver. 3.1.0.0) OS.

[craig]

My experience with office 2010, was very glitchy program. Uninstalled and went back to 2007 with no problems.

[mrwho]

I agreee that Office2010 is crap, but in this case I believe the printer driver could be the culprit.

Although I don't know this specific model, could it be that the drivers you're using are bidirectional and keep querying the printer when you run the office applications, thus keeping it busy?

Have you tried other driver versions? Or even checked the drivers for any option that will allow you to disable that bidirectional communication (if it exists)?

[RyanPacific]

Set up Wireshark and see where the culprit is. If you don't know how to interpret it connect the printer with a crossover cable, start the capture, open office and let it do it's hangup thing, stop the capture and send me the .pcap file. I've had to do this dealing with the same symptoms but with old print controllers like IP-411 and Win7. Just make sure to segregate the machine and the PC to save on bunches of useless broadcast traffic because we don't want to look at this through a filter.

[Stirton.M]

It is possible that perhaps the driver is setup to automatically poll the machine upon opening for options and settings changes.

For example, in any Konica Minolta driver, under the options tab, there is a setting for automatically acquiring the machine settings...see attached image....

Whenever I set up the driver, after the options have been polled, I turn this feature off. Enabling it has the effect that the driver takes a few seconds to appear, instead of almost immediately with the option disabled.

Of course, this is not always desirable, like in the case of using a fiery driver and you want to be able to use the advanced features like custom colour profiles saved on the fiery. Disabling the automatic setting disables the profile access.


Capture.JPG

[Autenien]

I will give an update on this next week, the customer is a small business owner and is out of the office this week. Thanks for the info and suggestions you folks have provided thus far, and I will let you know something soon.

[Fer]

What any office app does at startup is check the default printer for paperfeed options. Than if u select document settings, paper tab u can see the drawers/trays of your default printer. Like stack bypass, drawer 1-4 for Canon and manual feed, tray 2-5 for HP.

Maybe somethings goes wrong there.

[TheOwl]

I have seen something a little similar in a network whereby the program seems to hang, but in fact it is running and awaiting confirmation to use admin privileges.

Just try the following to see if it helps.

1. Find the program (Word or other Office 2010 app) in the Start Menu
2. Right Click on the program and select properties
3. In the Compatability tab, tick the box "Run program with administrator privileges"
4. Click on OK
5. Now test again to see if this has fixed the issue.

If this has fixed the issue, then you will only need to do this once for each application. Once the app is marked with the "Admin Privs", the registry will make sure that it always runs with the admin rights from there on.

[Autenien]

Tried everything suggested here, nothing worked. I talked the customer into reinstalling Windows 7, after which the mysterious issue magically went away. I am not sure what happened with the factory install, but his format and complete fresh install solved the issue.

Thanks to everyone here for taking the time to provide thoughts and suggestions on this matter. Also, I apologize for the delay in updating this thread, but I wanted to make sure that his issue was completely solved (printing with no issues for over a week now) before posting.

[Captain Scott]

Just out of interest, (after Win7 was reinstalled) did you guys load that desktop printer driver back on? I had an issue with Word crashing and it ended up being an old version of a Xerox driver that was already installed on the XP box. When I added the latest Ricoh driver to the PC, Word would crash. I updated the Xerox driver (not WHQL tested) and the issue went away. Hope this helps someone.