HPBOID and HPBPRO issues (solution)

Although HP used to make very good printers, their more recent printers
come with bloated and buggy software. It can be very difficult to find
plain vanilla drivers for some of the newer printers, and hp no longer
gives you the option from the install CD to install just the driver.

If you have an HP printer connected over a network (particularly a
Deskjet 6980 series, but perhaps other DeskJets and/or LaserJets as
well), you may notice multiple instances of HPBOID.exe and HPBPRO.exe
running in Task Manager. Typically, if you have run N print jobs on
your DJ 69xx since you last booted the computer, you will have N
instances of HPBOID.exe and N+1 instances of HPBPRO.exe. If you print a
lot between reboots, you may run out of Windows resources.

If you search, you may find several purported fixes, including running
DCOMcnfg, re-registering HPBPRO.exe as a service, and others. Most of
these do not work reliably.

A definitive fix is to delete (or, to be safer, rename) HPBOID.exe. You
may find several copies of this on your computer. The one that seems to
matter is in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 (you may have
a different number than the "3" at the end).

IMPORTANT: There is at least one side effect to deleting HPBOID.exe:
The "Print Test Page" function from the Printer Properties dialog no
longer works. If you click this button, you will get an error message:
"Test page failed to print." Printing from applications such as Notepad
and MS Word appears to work just fine.

For further info, here are some links:

HP LaserJet Printers - Multiple Instances of HPBPRO.EXE Running Causes
Server Crash or Hangs [several links from this page are not useful]
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&...us&obje
http://tinyurl.com/26sdld

HP Deskjet 6980 Series Printer - Computer Crashes when Printing Over a
Network and Network Task Manager Shows Multiple Instances of hpboid.exe
Running
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?docname=c00850968&c...s&dlc=e
http://tinyurl.com/36qcum

Basic Driver (requires USB install but allegedly you can make an HP
standard TCP/IP port later)
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.j...lang=en
http://tinyurl.com/yort6w


--
Lem -- MS-MVP

To the moon and back with 2K words of RAM and 36K words of ROM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
http://history.nasa.gov/afj/compessay.htm