Officejet printing problem with Excel / Office / PDF - alternative driver?

[ttjph]

Ref this thread (and several others):

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Inkjet-Printing/Officejet-Pro-8610-not-printing-MS-Word-documents/td-p/...

my Officejet 3830 will print from Notepad, and it will print from Excel using the hidden Administrator account, but it will not print from Excel, or Acrobat Reader, from my usual account.

I've tried multiple uninstall / reinstalls; setting permissions for all user types; and installing as a legacy device, with no success.

Is there an alternative driver available for my 3830, please?

[Chimney_83]

Thanks for the post and Welcome to HP Forums @ttjph, 

I see you are unable to print only from notepad, kudos to you for trying all the steps mentioned in the forums post you have shared. I would like to help. 

Recommend you to create a new user account with admin rights and try. 

If this does not work, 

Open devices and printer, 

Add the printer, 

Select Windows update, 

Select Deskjet 990c driver. 

Let me know if this helped. 

Please click ‘Accepted Solution’ on the post that solves your issue to help others find the solution. To show appreciation for my help, please click the ‘Thumbs Up’ Icon below.

[ttjph · Accepted solution]

Hi Chimney_83,

Thank you for your reply - I've only just seen it as apparently I hadn't set the forum to notify me (or the email got lost).

It appeared that the problem was limited to one user profile, and following further investigation I have eventually discovered, thanks to this thread: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1106087 that it appears to be a problem with Windows, caused by changing the user environment variables TEMP and TMP.  It also affected the built-in Print to PDF printer device.

By putting TEMP and TMP back to the default %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp, printing works for me again!  Unfortunately it means that temporary files are now written to my SSD, but that is down to Microsoft, not HP...

This was really hard to track down, so I'm posting this both here and in the Microsoft forums in the hope that others will be able to find this solution more easily than I did!