Symbols Print Before the Actual Print Job Starts

[ScDiT]

Issue description;

A user will go to send a print job to one of a number of printers on the network, when they print there seems be a 10% chance that they will get 1 to 3 pages of random symbols that cover a few lines on the top of each page, then the actual job they sent to the printer will come out fine. I have not managed to replicate this issue myself as it doesn't do it for me, using their user accounts or my own.

The printers in question are managed by a print server, over the domain network

I have seen multiple users have this same issue, printing to different printers, I have tried the same user accounts on a number of PCs and couldn't replicate, as well as using my own admin and test accounts with the same lack of results

the models affected are below;

HP Color LaserJet M255dw

HP LaserJet M203dw

The issues only seem to have started about 2-3 weeks ago from the time of this discussion, any information would be appreciated

[Repairatrooper]

As the symbol issue usually is caused by a driver issue I would make sure that the driver versions on the computers match the server. Perhaps windows updates has replaced the HP driver with a Microsoft driver? A corrupted file could also cause this issue so make sure you are printing the same file when you test.

[ScDiT]

Thanks for the information. I have given it a week to see if the changes I applied have made a positive impact and they have.

I checked the users PCs and they havent picked up any updates that I can see that changed the default print drivers, I did however make a change to the print processor for the affected printers to Winprint instead of the HPcpp250, this seems to have resolved it and is worth a try for anyone else having the issue. I did however restart each affected machine to get them all to the most recent build of Windows at the same time as the print processor change. 

Regardless the issue has gone for now so thanks for your help