Vista and PCL6

Vista continues to exhibit incompatibilities with peripherals, not just legacy devices but brand-new printers as well.

I have an Access database that launches a mail-merge with Word (Office 2003 with SP3, running under Vista Business) and the customer is printing to a new HP color laserjet. Using the latest PCL6 driver, the first page prints correctly but then is followed by a printer error page that mentions "KERNEL ERROR" and "IllegalOperatorSequence". After that happens, every attempt to print that, or any other merge document, the doc does not print but the printer issues another printer error page. The user has to log off & log back on to Windows, after which they can print one more page before the error messages return.

By trial and error, we found that using the PS driver does indeed work properly.

In a previous post, I mentioned that a new HP black-and-white laserjet would print text OK but graphics would be jumbled with the PCL5e driver; the PCL6 was better but not perfect, so that also requires using the PS driver.