A client has a Canon Pixma printer attached via USB to an SBS 2003 server. Works fine for all the users bar one – the user who just got a new Windows 7 professional machine. On investigation I considered that the issue might be the driver that the server attempts to send to the machine as it appeared to be an older XP driver. However when looking at the error reported at the end of the install and noted that it was “Windows cannot connect to the printer, Operation failed with error error 0x0000000d”.
I had just been doing some work for the client regarding dos redirection of LPT ports to support an old Foxpro application to print to networked shared laser printers and wondered if that approach might work in this case.
The basic idea is to use the net use command to redirect an LPT to a shared networked printer (in this case through a server).
the syntax used was
net use LPT3 servernamesharedprintername /persistent:yes
with the full name of this shared printer. One run and completed successfully I was able to add a printer but instead of saying the printer was network was able to “fool” windows 7 by selecting local printer and then selecting the LPT2 port from the list of ports. I selected the appropriate driver for the shared printer and finally tested with a test page. Working and user now able to print