For a couple-months-old Vista Home Premium (64-bit) laptop and a Dell Dimension E520 XP Home desktop with a Dell 946 AIO connected by USB, I have not been able to install a printer driver on the laptop by any method that successfully communicates with or prints to the 946 AIO.

The desktop prints just fine to the AIO.

The laptop, connecting by wireless to a Netgear router to which the desktop is cabled, successfully reads and writes to a shared folder on the desktop, so it does not seem that there is a general networking problem.  Both machines use the same workgroup name.

I temporarily uninstalled the security software on both machines and disabled the Windows firewall that was running on the laptop.  On the desktop, I also added the laptop network name to Internet Explorer's trusted intranet sites list.  Likewise on the laptop, added the desktop to the trusted intranet sites.  On the laptop, Network Discovery (and file sharing) are turned on.

The event log on the desktop is free of errors except 2 Security events, ID 680 and 529, source: Security, both related to user account logons.  One online post regards these errors as innocuous.  Several days ago there was also one System error, Event ID 19, Source: Print , described "Sharing printer failed + 1722," but that error has not reappeared.

The event log on the laptop looks good except for 2 System errors, ID 26 and 31, source: ssidrv (which is a Webroot Spysweeper component).  The logger does not find what it needs to supply a Description of the error.  I should say that is what the event log says now.  I imagine that the errors were probably not there when Webroot was uninstalled, don't know for sure.

Printer Installation Methods

1) The downloaded Dell driver.  It does not automatically detect the shared printer, but with Manual Add and specifying the host name and share name, it adds it to the list of printers that may be installed and ends up installing the driver.    But a test print generates an error from the Dell driver: "Communication Not Available.  The printer could not communicate with the computer."

2) Connect to the printer share.  This generates a dialog box entitled Connect to Printer with error message: "Cannot connect to the printer.  The operation could not be completed (error 0x0000000D)."  It seems to me that this removes any questions about the driver, since it does not get to the point of installing a driver.

3) Add Local Printer with Standard TCP/IP port.  I understand that this trick sometimes works for certain Vista network printer problems.  Automatic detection does not work, but supplying the host and share name, the driver installs.  For a test print, the driver looks like it is successfully sending a job to the printer (% progress bar), but nothing prints and the job remains stuck in the print queue.

I'm stumped.  Can anyone help?

--John Hupp