Photosmart 5360 Installation Failure

[FrustratedRon]

Hi folks, I've contacted HP and spent over an hour on a chat with a tech.  No help.  Got the "it isn't our stuff" answer, and then the chat got dumped when he ran out of ideas and disabled my keyboard.  Waste of time, I'm afraid.

I recently installed my Photosmart D5360 under WinXP, and although it worked, I had to bypass the installation software, since it crashed every time I tried to use it.  I manually loaded an XP driver, and it worked, but I was never happy with the performance. 

I often (inconsistently) had VERY slow response while spooling even 1 page jobs), especially from Word 2007, and other issues, including sharing and firewall problems, etc.  I tried turning off the firewall, etc., but nothing seemed to help.

SO, I'd been looking for an excuse to do so, so I wiped the hard disk clean, installed a new copy of Vista, did all the updates, and all was well until I installed the HP disk with the drivers for the printer.  It never finished installing the software.  Gets to the point where the printer is detected, which supposedly went OK, and then it just freezes (Step 6/7 in that process). 

(The entire installation took over 45 minutes, by the way, on an Athlon 64X2 w/3GB RAM, plenty of hard disk, high-speed DSL, etc.)  Since that time, even opening the Control Panel takes several minutes.  Everything is molasses, if it has to do with hardware. 

I went to the HP website, downloaded the full featured driver/software set, and tried installing that.  Same thing. 

Desperate, I even tried downloading the "Basic" driver/software set, same thing.  Gets to exactly the same point, and nothing.  Just sits there.

(The diagnostic software says all is well once, then next time, that the driver isn't up to date.  But it won't reinstall the software.  Same crash point as before.)

The Live Chat tech walked me through manually installing the driver from the Install CD.  That supposedly finally worked, but when I try to print, it sits with the disk churning for about 4 minutes, then says "Need to install driver software".  Tried installing again, failed again.

Then he decides it's something wrong with the USB ports, so he has me uninstall the USB hubs under Control Panel.  I am blindly following his instructions, when, of course, that disables my keyboard, mouse, and all other USB hardware.  Of course, I can't respond to his next question, so he decides the chat isn't working, and signs off, saying "Call the Live Help desk."  Wasted hour...

Now, I've managed to force the driver onto the hard disk, by manually installing the autorun.inf file into the Windows/System32 directory.  Printer starts working!  Printing is normal.   

Until I reboot, or disconnect and reconnect the printer, etc.  Then it says the driver needs to be reinstalled.  I say OK, it says it's reinstalling the driver from the Hard Disk, and that's successful, but then the whole cycle repeats next time.

Meantime, I can print from most programs (IE 7, etc.), and all seems well, but then when I try to use Control Panel to look at Printer Properties, ink levels, ports, etc. or try to print from any Office 2007 program, we're back to a repetitively churning hard disk, a message saying "Connecting to Printer - ESC to cancel".  This goes on for literally 4-5 MINUTES, and then it finally prints, just fine!  This happens EACH and EVERY time it tries to print from Office 2007.

Does anyone know what the heck is going on, and what I can try? 

It's obvious that the USB ports are fine (I use many USB devices, all of which work fine, even now, and I can switch the printer to any of the other ports, on or off the external hub, and get exactly the same symptoms.  STALL, and eventually printing just fine.

What is wrong?

What can I do?

I have heard of MANY folks running HP printers with Vista having such problems on the net, in literally dozens of places.  Apparently, HP has terrible drivers, driver support, and they even admit on their website that none of their drivers play well with Office, the most ubiquitous software package out there for Vista/XP.  (Their solution is to install another non-HP printer and make that the default, and manually select the printer each time you print.  Right....)

Apparently I need to dump this damned thing (which prints beautifully, if you wait several minutes to start each job!) and get something Non-HP.

You folks are my last hope for sanity.  Any ideas?

Thanks very much for slogging through this.  But I know you need to know where we are to help.  My thanks in advance for anything you can offer...

Ron