And yeah, this turned out be a problem printing, rather than a printer
problem.

We have 1 machine, that all of a sudden about a month ago, started to act
weird: A Dell OptiPlex 170L desktop wit a HP 1200 printer locally on USB.
It would print reports from Simply Accounting, but not anything else from
Simply. We first thought it was a Simply problem and reconfigured the
printer, reinstalled Simply, but it didn't change anything, you hit print,
it says it's printing, but job never shows up in spooler. It would still
print normally from any other program.

Then all of a sudden in the middle of the last payroll, it just stopped
being able to print at all. It would process the job, the spooler would
start running the job, transfer part of the data (or so it said), and then
all of a sudden it would stop and a bubble would come up saying "There was
an error while printing". I can't even get it to print the Windows test
pages, much less anything else.

I've tried reinstalling the driver, but it stops with a "unable to install
PCL6 driver". Tried connecting printer on parallel (EPT/EPP enabled)
instead, same problem. Tried connecting a different printer (a Dell 1110)
on the USB, known to work on a different computer, but the machine can't
find the printer at all. Checked the device manager, the HP printer isn't
listed (do it normally list the printers? I can't remember - haven't had to
fix printer problems forever).

Does USB work? I assume so, the mouse is on USB, and works fine. Spooler is
running, no errors in the event logs relating to anything that has to do
with printing. Does the printer work? Yeah, it seems to work fine on
different computer... with the same cable... And the computer prints just
fine to the network printer. But because this is where we do the payroll,
for security reasons we don't like printing that stuff on the network
printer, and we don't like having the cheque paper in that printer either.

Any ideas in this group? This by far beyond the strangest printing problem
I have ever run into...