About a month ago I was having problems getting a client’s new computer to print PDF files from within the browser. The computer was a brand new, HP desktop running Windows Vista 64-bit edition. I thought I’d had it fixed, but not anymore.
I ended up spending some more time onsite with the client today because they started to have problems printing again. With one of the user accounts, setup as Administrator, they could print with no problems. Another Administrator account we could setup they couldn’t print PDF’s.
I first tried to update drivers on the printers, download and reinstalled Adobe Reader and Foxit Software Reader (my preferred) multiple times.
Next I tried making sure that regardless of user account, both Internet Explorer 8 and the PDF reader software was being run as an Administrator. No matter what I did, nothing fixed the problem.
Finally this evening I was messing around with changing default printers and realized that as long as the default printer was set as the HP Laserjet, the crash would occur. I ended up changing the default printer to be the Microsoft XPS Document Writer and the error would no longer occur. The problem is that the user now has to manually change the printer to the HP Laserjet, and then print.
I’m hoping an updated driver in the future may fix this issue, but changing the default printer has fixed the issue for the client temporarily.