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Devices and Printers EMPTY. Excel Crashing. Can't Print.

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Mehovoric

Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2011
Location
Somewhere in the US
Hey guys,

So I been working on this for days. But last week I installed a shared printer onto my computer. Its an HP printer. But when I installed it, it seemed to install fine, but now my "devices and printers" is completely empty. It doesn't even show my monitors or keyboard. Nothing. 0 Items. Its extremely irritating. I can't print. Excel keeps crashing.

Yes, I've made sure the print spooler service is running.
Yes, I've checked the bluetooth service, even though I'm not sure what that has to do with it.
Yes, I've done "sfc scannow"
Yes, I've done a checkdisk
I can't even start TuneUp Utilities.
Virus Scans have come up negative.
There's no erroneous entries in Device Manager.

So unless you guys have some other ideas. My last resort step is complete wipe and start over. And I really don't want to do that.

FYI: I have Windows 7 Pro 32, set up on a domain.
 
It is connected to a computer across the room via USB and shared on that computer. I browsed to it from mine and installed and it automatically went out and got the drivers. I've tried to find what it installed but without success.
 
I've seen some weird stuff popping up lately w/ Windows installs...about how long after you installed the printer did you notice all of these problems? And I can't see how Excel crashing would be as the result of a printer driver / software, especially if you aren't printing when it happens. Have you run a SMART scan on your HDD?
 
I would get the software from HP or use the disk and manually install it that way including all updates. HP software can be buggy.
 
Right after I installed the printer, it started doing this.

Yeah I was going to do that this time instead of automatically finding the drivers.

But here's something really weird. Yesterday, I went to the other computer and unshared the printer. I shutdown my computer last night and went home. Today I come in, start it up. Everything is there! My computer is working normally again. Excel isn't crashing either. The printer that I had tried to install isn't even showing, so I'm guessing it didn't install correctly.
 
its an HP Officejet 6000 E609a.

So went to HP's site and got the actual install. I installed drivers for a network printer without hooking it up and then went to the Devices and Printers and added the printer, and it found the installed drivers and seems to have installed correctly. Nothing has messed up yet. But I haven't restarted yet either :)

So weird. ugh.
 
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