I’ve been having a weird problem with printing on my Xerox Phaser 8550 from Vista. One of those issues that have been around forever, but I never found time to look into. The problem was that after a print job had been spooled, it sat in the print queue for something over a minute before being sent to the printer. At least it was my impression that this was the case, although of course it’s kind of hard to see what’s really going on once the job is in the queue.

I searched around for a while today and found a bunch of people with similar problems, which were apparently related to a Vista fix (KB935807). In many cases these issues were about Canon printers and/or came up only in conjunction with Word 2007, so that didn’t seem to fit my own problem. I still tried switching off Windows Firewall, which helped a lot of these people, but that didn’t change anything about the issue I was seeing. Of course I also tried reinstalling the driver (btw — if you have trouble doing that, try first removing the printer that’s already installed), but to no avail. In the end I’m still not sure what the actual problem was, but I did find a workaround. I configured my port to use the LPR protocol instead of port 9100 RAW for the network communication. I had to enter a queue name for this configuration, but “lp” was either the right guess or it just didn’t matter. In any case my printer now starts working almost immediately after spooling a job, like it always used to do way back when I was using XP. Great.