is there some bizarre reason why HP software makes hundreds of connections per minute to my c309a?

[LMHmed]

My firewall logs indicate that there are currently more than 300 connections between svchost an my printer. This is a UDP connection to port 161. This constitutes close to 90% of my network traffic. Tasklist indicates that the instance of svchost making these connections is being tasked by Pml driver HPZ12. Why in the world would a printer driver need to connect to a printer literally every 2 seconds all day and night? Is there some semi-plausible explanation for this or is this just another case of HP using morons as developers? I decided to just turn off my printer to stop this, but today when I booter up I suddenly got hundreds of attempts for svchost to connect out to, svchost.exe port 427 to 92.242.144.50 port 427 UDP svchost.exe port 1648 to 92.242.144.50 port 139 TCP This IP is some kind of error service and you are often redirected there if you try to go to a domain that doesn't exist. I decided to turn the printer back on and the attempted connections stopped and have not returned. Is there some way I can stop all these connections to my printer, or turn off the printer and not have my logs get filled up with other junk, or is HP software still the crap it always has been before? LMHmedchem