Have you rechecked the Options settings in Word, Envelopes and Labels? Directions: here.

>>Have you rechecked the Options settings in Word, Envelopes and Labels? <<

 

Thanks for the response. Yes, those options have been checked and rechecked many, many times and seem to have no effect on the problem.

 

I also tried un-installing then re-installing the printer driver thinking there was a driver glitch but again the problem remained unchanged. I then tried the same thing with an intervening re-boot of the system and the problem again remained unchanged. Finally, I tried physically disconnecting the printer, uninstalling the driver then reconnecting the printer and letting Vista install the driver. Again....the problem remained the same.

 

Interestingly enough, I have discovered that if I print the envelope to the XPS printer then print the envelope from the IE7 XPS viewer, the envelope prints properly! I shouldn't have to go through the XPS printer each time in order to print envelopes properly though and I haven't figured out yet what all of this is telling me. Since the XPS viewer in IE7 is printing through the same physical printer and driver that Word is (and printing properly), it would seem to indicate that the problem is in the Word interaction with the print driver and not the print driver itself.

 

Finally, I went ahead and completely un-installed Office and re-installed it, thinking that would surely fix it. The problem remains however.

 

I am completely stumped at this point.

 

I'd recommend deleting the Data and Options key in the following registry entry (MS Word not open)

 

 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word

 

To do this, Windows Key/R, type regedit, then click OK. Click to the left of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER to expand the key, then find the above listed entry. Right click the Data entry, and delete, Right click the Option entry, and delete.

 

Restart Word and it will recreate these two keys. Let me know if the problem still persists.

>>....Restart Word and it will recreate these two keys. Let me know if the problem still persists.>>

 

Hi Allan,

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I followed your instructions to the T but the problem remains. What is most puzzling to me is that if I print the envelope from Word to the XPS document writer then print that document(envelope) to the Laser Printer through the MS XPS viewer in IE7, the envelope prints properly.

 

If I print it directly from Word to the Laser Printer however, I get the problem I described earlier.

 

I think that is probably a great clue but I just don't know enough about the interfaces involved here to be able to figure out what it means yet.

Try renaming the normal.dotx file as it is probably a style problem.

 

Exit Word

 

Windows Key/R, then type the following

%userprofile%\application data\microsoft\templates

Click OK.

 

Rename the normal.dotx to normal.old

 

Restart Word

I renamed "normal" to "normal.old" and re-started word. Unfortunately, the problem still remains.

 

 

Have you tried the Add to Document button? Does the envelope print properly?

A USB to parallel port converter is available.

I had been doing the "add to document" from the beginning. It has no effect on the problem.

 

I have finally opened an incident with Dell service. After going through some things, they finally decided that since my printer was still under warranty, they would express me a brand new one (new, not refurbished). I don’t know if that will solve the problem or not but we'll see in a few days. Hopefully it will however.

 

 

Also, if I can find the right connector that works, I am going to connect my old IBM/Lexmark laser printer (which still works fine and prints envelopes fine) from my old Windows 98 system to this Vista system and see if that tells me anything. I already have the driver for the IBM printer available in Vista so it's just a matter of finding the right physical connector for the parallel port.

The new printer arrived this morning. I completely removed the driver software for the old printer and installed everything new, from scratch from the new CD-ROM. With the new printer and the new software from the new CD-ROM, the envelopes all print properly so that *finally* resolved the problem!

 

 

 

 

And….despite what DELL had told me (everytime I checked last week for updated printer drivers) that there were no new printer drivers available and that I had the most current one, the new printer driver *does* have more settings available and *does* operate differently from the old one!

 

 

 

 

Thanks for your help and suggestions.

 

 

Thanks for posting, Scott. I'm glad the problem is solved.

 

(Doesn't it feel good when it works?)

I've been having the exact same problems for months.  I uninstalled the printer driver and reinstalled the driver on dell's support page.  The new driver looks just like (and probably is) the old one. Moreover, reinstalling the driver did not fix the problem. Is there another printer driver that is not available on dell's support page that will fix the envelope printing problem?