The past couple of weeks I have been dealing with a fairly aggravating issue at home. My wife has a Windows 7 laptop which for some reason started printing everything repeatedly (repeatedly being defined as forever and ever until the bottom of the paper tray was found). Our printer in particular is a HP Laserjet 1022n which is connected to the network, and my wife’s computer connects via the network directly (as in not using any print server to mediate the jobs). When this was occurring and looking at the print queue I was seeing the one job, however the job kept flashing (or perhaps blinking) and it seemed like the job was being continuously restarted. This would even happen for test pages. The only other machines in the house are Linux/Unix and none of them had the same issue so it didn’t appear to be caused by the printer itself. One other detail was that I purchased this printer new in 2005 and it has been working just fine since then, with this computer and others.
Things I Tried
- Updating the Windows 7 Print Driver
- Updating the Printers Firmware
- Deleting the Printer and Recreating it in Window
None of the above “fixed” the problem. However I was able to find a solution. The problem apparently was Bi-Directional Support.
- Click on Start
- Select Devices and Printers
- Right Click on the Symptomatic Printer
- Select Printer Properties
- Click on the Ports Tab
- Uncheck Enable Bidirectional Support
- Click Apply and Re-Test
