HP printer and Adobe Illustrator colours changing on Mac

Question

I have got Adobe Illustrator CS3 on my iMac, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. I recently got a new printer, an HP Photosmart B110, product number CN245B, serial number CN1393K1Q405J8, driver version HP Inkjet 8 Driver 3.5.2. For some reason, whenever I press Print in the File menu in Illustrator it crashes, taking my work along with it. So I have to save it and open it with Preview and print it from there. But the colours change. For example, this image:

(here is the ai file)

looks like this after it has been printed (a scan):

The two a letters are done with a linear gradient with no blending, but it's exactly the same colour.

It does work if I export the ai as a png/jpeg in preview.

What do I do?

Answer 1

From Apple support : Crash printing | Illustrator, InDesign | CS3, CS4 | Mac OS 10.7 (Lion)

Issue

Printing from InDesign CS3 or CS4, or Illustrator CS3 or CS4 on Apple OS 10.7 (code named Lion) results in the Adobe application crashing. Acrobat 8.x is also installed, or was installed on the system previously.

Solution

The following workaround can be applied to get these older versions of Illustrator and InDesign to print on this newer operating system. Remove the following files and back them up:

[Hard Drive]/Library/Printers/PPDs/contents/Resources/en.lproj
[Hard Drive]/Library/Printers/PPDs/contents/Resources/Zh_CN.lproj
[Hard Drive]/Library/Printers/PPDs/contents/Resources/Ja.lproj
[Hard Drive]/Library/Printers/PPDs/contents/Resources/ko.lproj
[Hard Drive]/Library/Printers/PPDs/contents/Resources/Zh_TW.lproj

Additional information

Creative Suite 3.x and 4.x applications were not designed to function under this newer version of the Mac OS, so some issues can affect them. Upgrading to the latest versions of these applications ensures that you achieve maximum compatibility with the new OS.