Issue with the HP Universal Print Driver with specific printers (M608 & M611)

[MyNameIsJoao]

Hello guys,

I work in a team responsible of the printing infrastructure in our company.

We have recently upgraded our print server (Windows Server 2022), which contains print queues for HP printers. We updated our drivers too so we installed the latest version of the HP Universal Print Driver (v.7.1.0).

Since this migration, we've been experiencing a problem :

Some print queues for a specific printer model are slow.

When we send a print job from a computer, the job in question appears in the print queue after 30 seconds (which is abnormal) and is then processed immediately. If I print a test page from the server directly there is no delay.

After a little research, we noticed that this seemed to be due to the auto-configuration that the driver launches on its own after creating a print queue on the server.

I've seen that it's possible to "preconfigure" the HP UPD driver so that this auto-configuration doesn't take place, but unfortunately this means that we have to reinstall the driver on our server when everything is already in production (we can't…).

We're currently using a workaround which is to create print queues and configure them while the printer is offline so that auto-configuration can't take place and it works.

If you run the auto-configuration after creating the print queue in the "Device settings" tab, this 30-second delay reappears.

I tried to stop the "Pml Driver HPZ12" service on our server as described in the following documentation:

https://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01816027.pdf#page=57&zoom=100,0,456

But this only has the effect of no longer letting us launch an automatic configuration manually from the queue. The driver does the autoconfig just after creation, it seems, because the problem still occurs if we create the queue when the printer is online.

Do you have a solution for this problem? Have you had similar cases?

PS : All our computers are on Windows 10 and with the previous version of the HP UPD we were using the issue was not.

See you,

Joao