When Your Printer Fails to Print in Best Mode

There is nothing more infuriating than having your printer work fine for a long time and suddenly decide to malfunction. Adding to this pain is calling the customer help line which takes you to another country to troubleshoot it through their various scripts and guides. It wastes hours of your time, or if you do it via email, days of emails going back and forth.

This was my problem around Christmas. My HP Photosmart Pro B8350 printer, which has worked flawlessly for over a year suddenly decided it would only print in draft or low resolution mode. If I tried to use the Best mode, say for photos, after the job was sent to the printer, the light would just flash away, but nothing would print. How fun! When you checked the print queue, the job you had sent to the printer was not there! Huh? No kidding. Like, where in the snaffledowiddle did it go?

Using HP email service, I contacted tech support, which took me to India. Over a course of days, they had me go through all the hoops in their repair script. I went from A to Z, removing software, reloading it, deleting parts of the registry, testing it again, ad nauseum. Nothing worked. The Tech support people really had no clue, as they were going through all of the repair scripts in their catalog. I thought it was my Corel, since it is where the issue popped up. Then I thought it was a the print driver but after I realized that I had the latest print driver. I was about ready to bite the bullet and buy yet another printer. Printing in low resolution is OK for text, but that is it, this is a photo printer.

Aggravated with no solution, I start "googling" various key word combinations and finally come to an HP document online addressing this exact issue! Funny, the HP techies had not even seen it or knew it had existed. Incredible!

The cause has nothing to do with the HP printer or its driver but is caused by Microsoft. It occurs when MS XPS document writer is loaded on a computer before or after the print driver is installed. The XPS document writer software updates the Unidrv.dll file and the Unidrvui.dll files from version 0.3.1296.4 to 0.3.6000.16438 automatically, which then causes the problem.

Use the following steps to update the MS XPS Essential Package Version 1.0:

1. From the Windows taskbar, click Start and then click Run .
2. In the Open box, type control appwiz.cpl and then press Enter . The Add or Remove Programs window appears.
3. Under Currently installed programs , locate and click XPS Essentials Pack and then click Remove .
4. Restart the computer.
5. Go to microsoft.com/downloads and search for Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0 (released Nov. 2008). Read the requirements, your computer may also need MS Core XML Services installed before XPS.
6. Also, if you have Win XP Service pack 2, simply upgrade to service pack 3, BUT only after you have installed XPS 1.0 first. If you already have XP SP3, and no XPS you will need to install .Net Framework also from Microsoft. Then, install XPS 1.0.
7. Once done, do a test print in Best mode using your printer menus etc. If it works, that is it. This solution worked for me!

So, despite the Tech Support, it was me, the customer that found the solution on the HP website! It was right under the noses. However, until I had used the correct search key words in the right manner, I was not able to locate the document.