After update to HP UPD PCL 5 on network drivers, local printers now printing very slow

[remy001]

I recently upgraded the HP Universal Print Driver PCL 5 on my Windows 2008 R2 file and print server.  All 5 network HP printers now show the new UPD PCL 5 driver, and all 5 seem to be working properly from all attached network clients.

However, as soon as I had updated the server drivers, anyone with a locally attached HP printer began to experience very slow response times when attempting to print jobs to their local printer or even bring up the properties of the local printer.  I believe this is because the local printers also use the HP UPD PCL5 driver, and something "broke" when I updated the driver on the server.   If the local printer is set as default, trying to bring up a properties dialog box takes several seconds (before it was instant), and clicking PRINT in any application results in a noticable delay before the print dialog appears, followed by another noticeable delay (as in 10-20 seconds) before the job is processed and the application control returned ot the user.  The printer then takes an additional few seconds to process the job.  Basically local print jobs just went from 5 seconds to over 30 seconds or more for each job to begin printing.  This is unacceptable.

I tried deleting all the network printers from one of the client PCs, then removing the local printer as well.  I rebooted, then used the HP UPD PCL 5 install.exe to run the install on the local machine, choosing to do a USB install.  I turned the local printer back on and it was recognized and loaded the new HP UPD PCL5 driver, but the problem persists.

So after messing around with this more yesterday I think I have it narrowed down to a port issue.  It seems that when the PCs with local printers attached downloaded the new UPD PCL 5 form the network (to update their network printer drivers), it reconfigured the USB port for each locally connected printer.  The USB port for the local printer now shows as "DOT4 Generic IEEE 1284.4 printing support", whereas before I'm fairly certain it showed as "DOT4 HP Laserjet Modelnumber".   This whitepaper (which is for Windows XP unfortunately) would seem to support the theory that the port has changed and that the Generic port is much slower (which is what we're seeing now with local printers).  Whitepaper on Generic DOT4 port issue

I have tried deleting ALL printers that use the UPD from a local system and then using the install.exe form the UPD package to install the local printer as a USB printer (disconnecting it prior to the install and then reconnecting it when prompted by the install process), yet the same Generic port is recreated.  How can I change from the Generic port to an HP specific port driver to make the printers respond normally again?

By the way, I opened a ticket with HP Support on this issue Monday afternoon, it's now Wednesday morning and the only response I received was a request to make sure my cables weren't more than 6' long.  Seriously HP Support? 

[JPac]

Hello remy001,

I see that you are having performance issues with the UPD PCL5 Print Driver.   Could you open the About Tab in the Printer Properties and provide the UPD Version information?  This would help us understand the issue.

In addition, any environment information would be helpful; such as Network Setup (Windows, Novell, Citrix), OS of the client PC, etc.

Thank You!

[ApolloXIII · Accepted solution]

My best guess is that you are not using the version-specific driver name on the print server.   The version-specific driver name will look something like "HP Universal Printing PCL6 (v5.9.0)".   The non-version-specific name will look like "HP Universal Printing PCL6"  

When working with print servers, it is recommended to use the version-specifc driver name.   I think that what has happened here is that the driver was updated on the server, and that update was then pushed to the clients via point-and-print because the driver names match. 

You have indicated that you are using the PCL5 driver.   For general office printing PCL6 will provide the best combination of performance and print quality.   I would recommend moving to PCL6 right away unless your devices or custom applications/solutions are not compatible with PCL6.  (This is very rare) 

If it were my system, here is what I would do. 

1.  Download UPD PCL6 5.9.0 and PARK from www.hp.com/go/upd
2. Install UPD PCL6 5.9.0 on my print server using the version-specific name - creating a temporary print queue. 
3. Run AutoUpgradeUPD.exe from the PARK to delete the existing print queues on my print server and re-create them with the PCL6 driver.   (See http://youtu.be/mYCVx1RBp9w for more information about this utility)  
4. Delete the temporary queue
5. On my clients, I would delete the existing USB printer connections.  
6. Run the UPD PCL6 5.9.0 installer and select USB mode - Plug and Play  and make sure the two check boxes are selected.
7. Re-connect the local printers. 

One other thing I might try would be running PRNCON from the PARK on each of the clients.    This will delete and recreate the printer connections to the print server.    This can be run without any command-line switches, but I like to use the '-w 2000' command to force a 2 second delay between deleting the printer connection and recreating it. 

As a last step, I would make sure to remove any old/unused print drivers from the print server.    

[remy001]

Apollo XIII,

Thank you for the suggestions, they are greatly appreciated.  I may try to update the network queues to UPD PCL 6 soon, but I want to test the PCL 6 driver first to make sure it does not alter the output (margins and such) of our documents, the majority of which were created with PCL 5 drivers and date back to Word 2000 and 2003 (We are using Word 2010 currently). 

Also, I believe you are correct in yor assumption that using the non-version-specific version of the driver (HP Uniersal Printing PCL 5) created a situation where the driver was pushed down to the local clients.  This seems to be exactly what happend, as all the local clients that had been using an HP Universal Printing PCL 5 driver for their local systems (as opposed to a device-specific driver form the Windows driver store in Windows 7) were the machines that had the issues.  My questions would be:

1) How are we, as adminstrators, supposed to know to use version-specific drivers when updating the network queues?  This whole mess came about because I was trying to solve a problem with output on the network printers when using the HP UPD PCL5.  I knew the first thing HP Support would suggest was "update the drivers to the latest ones", so that's what I did, and disaster struck.  I downloaded those drivers direct form HP, and at no point was I warned not to use the non-version-specific dirvers.  Knowing this in advance would have saved me 3 work days of grief.

2) So if the driver was indeed pushed to the clients as it seems to have been, why would it then cause all the clients to process print jobs so slowly?   What is wrong with the HP UPD PCL5 that it can't process local print jobs without long delays?  Even when I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the UPD PCL5 on the local machine, it still wouldn't process jobs normally.  Does this mean that I should not be using the UPD for locally connected machines?  Sure seems like it.

In the end I solved the issue myself temporarily (I am going to rebuild the network print queues as you outlined above afte rtesting the PCL 6 driver).  The way I solved this was:

1) Removed all printer devices from local machine that utilized the UPD.

2) Used Regedit to remove all keys related to the UPD from HKLM-System-ControlSet001-Control-Print-Environments-Windowsx64-Drivers (delete anything that referenes the UPD) and Version-3 (again delete all references to the UPD).  Do the same thing for ControlSet002.

3) Once the registry was cleaned of UPD entries, I ran Install.exe from the UPD x64 package.  I choose USB install and checked "Remove all versions of HP UPD from Windows driver store" and unchecked "Add HP UPD to Windows driver store".  This removes the UPD PCL5 from the Windows 7 driver store.

4) Disconnect local printer and Reboot PC

5) Updated my local Windows driver store by kicking off a printer install on LPT1 and clicking the Windows Update button at the driver selection screen.  This updates/adds all available printer drivers to the Windows 7 driver store.  Cancelled the install after the store was updated.

6) Reconnected the local printer, at which point Windows installs it with the driver from the local printer driver store instead ot the HP UPD.  

With the HP UPD no longer on the local system, the local printers behave normally.  I then can add the network printers back to the Devices and Printers folder, and they behave normally as well. 

[ApolloXIII]

Hi Remy, 

I'm glad you have a solution that is working for you.   I will do my best to address your questions:  

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1) How are we, as adminstrators, supposed to know to use version-specific drivers when updating the network queues?  

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From the www.hp.com/go/upd homepage you can select documents and whitepapers and then select setup and install.  This will get you to a handful of useful UPD documents.  I recommend the System Administrator's Guide which can be downloaded from here:  http://h20564.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/kb/docDisplay/?docId=emr_na-c03633736    It's a lengthy document, but there is a lot of helpful information in there. 

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2) So if the driver was indeed pushed to the clients as it seems to have been, why would it then cause all the clients to process print jobs so slowly?   What is wrong with the HP UPD PCL5 that it can't process local print jobs without long delays?  Even when I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the UPD PCL5 on the local machine, it still wouldn't process jobs normally.  Does this mean that I should not be using the UPD for locally connected machines?  Sure seems like it.

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I do not know why the clients were processing jobs slowly.   My only guess is that the point and print (network) process that pushed the drivers to the clients resulted in an incomplete upgrade of the plug and play (USB) queues. Generally when I see a slowdown like that, the system is trying to update some settings.   However, that does not explain why uninstalling and re-installing did not resolve the issue.     

I can't explain why you experienced this behavior, but I can tell you that many customers are successfully using UPD for locally-connected printers.    

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1) Removed all printer devices from local machine that utilized the UPD.

2) Used Regedit to remove all keys related to the UPD from HKLM-System-ControlSet001-Control-Print-Environments-Windowsx64-Drivers (delete anything that referenes the UPD) and Version-3 (again delete all references to the UPD).  Do the same thing for ControlSet002.

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I do not recommend using Regedit to remove printers.     Too many things can go wrong when directly editing the registry, and I find it's usually just not necessary.     I usually just remove the printers and drivers and then restart the spooler.     If you really want to do a complete cleanup, you might try the Microsoft Fixit for Printing 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2012/02/24/microsoft-fixit-for-printing.aspx.    Note that this is a Microsoft utility so any questions regarding its use should be directed to Microsoft. 

[remy001]

Final follow-up to this thread for other admins who may run into similar issues.

After downloading and testing the numbered HP UPD PCL 6 (5.9.0) referenced by the HP expert (thank you ApolloXII), it seemed to resolve our issues with print quality that initially spawned this entire problem (we'd updated the network print drivers to try and resolve that issue).

I ended up using Print Manager in Windows Server 2008 R2 to manually delete the printers and print queues for the affected network printers since we only had a half dozen of them.   I then rebuilt the queus using the "Add Printer" wizard in Print Manager, and defined them the same way as before only with the new PCL 6 UPD (5.9.0) as the driver.  Since this was a different driver version than the non-numbered PCL driver used locally by our directly connected printers, it did not push the driver down to everyone's directly connected printers.  Now we can print both to the network printers and locally both at speed and with full quality. 

Rebuilding the print queues using the numbered version of the PCL 6 UPD was the fix for our issue.