Printing Misalignment on Avery Labels (#5163)

[Paeon]

EDIT: I'm finding now that the misalignment was not as consistent as I thought, so it looks like this may be a simple issue of the printer having trouble gripping the paper and ultimately "overshooting" the starting point of each print. As of now, I'm giving up on printing avery labels with my HP 5255, but if anyone can still suggest an explanation for why I was able to print these 2" x 4" labels perfectly fine several weeks ago, but now all of my attempts are off by 1/16" to 1/4", then I would really appreciate it. Thanks.

ORIGINAL POST:

I'm trying to print Avery 2" x 4" labels (#5163) on my HP 5255 OfficeJet using a Microsoft Word template into which I just paste full-size 2" x 4" PNG images. When I run a test print on a sheet of plain 8.5" x 11" letter paper, everything lines up perfectly, but whenever I use a sheet of blank label, everything is vertically offset by about 1/4" (i.e., as if the printer is misreading the page borders, and starting to put down ink to paper about 1/4" too early). Avery support has no helpful suggestions. I've tried tinkering with different things (like editing the image, downloading a new template, converting Word to Adobe), but the problem has been consistently reproducible, with correctly aligned prints on plain letter paper, but the same misalignment (in terms of both direction and amplitude) on all prints I try on Avery label sheets.

In addition, several weeks ago, I printed another full-size 2" x 4" PNG label design multiple times without any alignment problems. At that time, I was also using a older copy of the Avery template, though at this point I've tried printing both that old template as well as the most recent Avery template without any change in my misalignment problem. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.