Printing Problem - Word 2003 on Vista

I'm a tech support pro with lots of client and network experience under my
belt but cannot solve a vexing printing problem I'm having on my own home
network.

I have 5 computers in the house - 4 laptops, 1 desktop and an older iMac.
All networked for Internet access and one shared HP network printer. The
printer was previously direct connected to the LAN via it's own Ethernet
connector but that recently broke and the printer is now shared off of the
one desktop.

I resisted Vista as long as I could but both my wife and son did an end run
around me and bought new machines with Vista pre-installed. One of them is
the aforementioned desktop with the attached printer. The other is a laptop.

On both Vista machines, I have a problem printing documents from Word 2003
(installed as part of Office 2003 Pro). When printing via a network
connection, the print job freezes and fails to complete unless Word is
minimized to the task bar and then maximized again. Now that the Vista
desktop is direct connected to printer via USB, I no longer have this issue
on that one machine. But prior to this reconfiguration, both it and the
Vista laptop exhibited this print behavior.

You hit print, you see the page count rattle off on the Word status bar at
the bottom, but nothing comes out the printer. You check the printer status
and you see it sitting there in the cue with nothing happening. The only way
to release the print job to the printer then is to minimize and then maximize
the main Word program window.

Anyone else having a similar issue and if so, what did you do to fix it?

All systems are up to date with latest Microsoft updates.

try disable/uncheck "background printing" in Word, Tools, Options, Printing.

501c3help wrote:

> I'm a tech support pro with lots of client and network experience under my
> belt but cannot solve a vexing printing problem I'm having on my own home
> network.
>
> I have 5 computers in the house - 4 laptops, 1 desktop and an older iMac.
> All networked for Internet access and one shared HP network printer. The
> printer was previously direct connected to the LAN via it's own Ethernet
> connector but that recently broke and the printer is now shared off of the
> one desktop.
>
> I resisted Vista as long as I could but both my wife and son did an end run
> around me and bought new machines with Vista pre-installed. One of them is
> the aforementioned desktop with the attached printer. The other is a laptop.
>
> On both Vista machines, I have a problem printing documents from Word 2003
> (installed as part of Office 2003 Pro). When printing via a network
> connection, the print job freezes and fails to complete unless Word is
> minimized to the task bar and then maximized again. Now that the Vista
> desktop is direct connected to printer via USB, I no longer have this issue
> on that one machine. But prior to this reconfiguration, both it and the
> Vista laptop exhibited this print behavior.
>
> You hit print, you see the page count rattle off on the Word status bar at
> the bottom, but nothing comes out the printer. You check the printer status
> and you see it sitting there in the cue with nothing happening. The only way
> to release the print job to the printer then is to minimize and then maximize
> the main Word program window.
>
> Anyone else having a similar issue and if so, what did you do to fix it?
>
> All systems are up to date with latest Microsoft updates.