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Yes that's right, 64bit driver on 32bit system.

Here's the situation: I installed a printer driver on an XP Professional machine that will be shared with other users across the network. One of the machines on the network is an XP Professional x64 machine.

So, after installing the printer on the 32 bit machine, I went in to the properties and added the drivers for the 64bit version (the 64bit XP machine wouldn't print).

Anyway, now the 32bit XP Professional machine is having problems.
Since reboot, I can't open the Printers and Faxes window, the system properties won't show and the network connections window won't display either.

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For print drivers, adding drivers with different architectures should not affect the local PC. The extra drivers are cached so when a PC with a different architecture connects to the print server there is a driver available for it to use.

I would think your problem is unrelated to the extra drivers you added, it would either be related to the 32-bit print driver you installed on the 32-bit machine (not the extra ones), or another issue.

You may want to uninstall all the print drivers and try again. First install the 32-bit driver by itself and make sure it is not the problem.

Instructions on how to completely remove print drivers are available from this KB article.

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Thanks for the info. I thought installing the 64bit drivers were to support other pc's on the network... thanks for the confirmation. – brawn Oct 4 '10 at 15:08
After uninstalling the problems went away and returned on reinstall. After incrementally shutting down background services, it turns out the issue was the print spooler service. If I killed the service the problems would resolved and once the service was restarted, I could print normally too. In the end I had to set the Print Spooler service to start manually and then add a batch file to start the service later in the windows startup process. – brawn Oct 4 '10 at 15:28
@brawn - The Print Spooler service loads the drivers up in-process, so I would imagine that the 32-bit driver you have has a bug in it. You may want to see if there is an updated driver from the vendor, or a different printing model (PCL vs PS if your printer supports it), or a universal driver (like the Lexmark Universal Driver). – ta.speot.is Oct 5 '10 at 3:10
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