I have two conflicting HP Printers (OfficeJet Pro 6830 and OfficeJet 7110): if I install the driver for the second printer, it corrupts the installation of the first one: the documents don't arrive at the print queue anymore, and even if in the Control Panel-> devices and printers, the printer appears, if I click on 'Properties', I get a system message telling me: "This printer is not currently installed...". If I uninstall all HP software, and delete all reference to the printers from registry and from Device Manager, upon reinstall the HP installer still fails to correctly register the printer. If I proceed with the HP troubleshooter "HP Installation Failure - Unknown Device.hta", it downloads another tool, which locates the error in the file "HPMACRONAMES.GPD", and corrects it.
After this step, I am able to reinstall and correctly register my Officejet Pro 6830, and get it to work. However, if I then proceed to reinstall the OfiiceJet 7110, the same issue reappears!
Edit 09.06.2018:
After a lot of trial-and-error, I have now boiled down the problem to that one conflicting driver file: HPMACRONAMES.gpd
- the OfficeJet 6830 driver uses a version (a) of HPMACRONAMES.gpd which dates from 16 July 2014, 03:52:00 and is 16'491 bytes big.
- the OfficeJet 7110 driver uses a version (b) from 9 october 2014, 05:22:38 which is 11'251 bytes.
Both drivers install such file into directory C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\x64\3 .
If version (a) is installed, the OJ6830 works, but the OJ7110 doesn't receive any job into its print queue. It's impossible to send even a test page from the settings dialogue: if I do so, the system responds with a popup "You do not have permission to modify the settings for this printer. If you need to change the settings, contact your system administrator." (note that I am logged in as system administrator).
If on the other hand version (b) is installed, the OJ7110 works, but the OJ6830 can't be used.
Question: does anybody see a workaround to this? Is there some probability to modify the printer installations in a way to use both versions of the macronames.gpd (located in different directories), so that I can print from both printers from the same system?
Actually, I can manually copy the correct version of the driver into the directory before printing on each one of the printers, but for practical reasons, I need to have a 'push-the-button-and-print' solution.