I'm fixing a printer over at a friends house, that has ceased to work with her computer. It's a Lexmark Z715, and wasn't working previously when I tried to get it working.
I uninstalled the printer driver and attempted to reinstall it using the Lxk700 drivers for Windows XP.
When I attempted to re-install the Lxk700 driver, at the end of the installation I received the following error: "The RPC server is unavailable"
After checking in System Services (Start->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services) and noting that the "Print Spooler" service was stopped, I tried to start it and it said that one of the services dependencies was not running.
I immediately thought of the error message "The RPC server is unavailable" and noticed that the "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)" service was a dependency of the "Print Spooler".
I checked the "Remote Procedure Call (RPC)" service and noticed that it was running, and that additionally the "Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Locator" service was running as well.
I tried to start the "Print Spooler" service from the command line using the command "net start spooler" and got the error "system error 1068 has occured"
I repaired this error by looking at this thread and this other thread by running the command "del /Q /F /S "C:Windows\System32\Spool\Printers*.*"
And editing the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL _MACHINE\System\Current Control Set\Services\Spooler\DependOnService
Which looked like this:
LexBces RPCSS
and now looks like this:
RPCSS
I restarted the computer, I can start the print spooler just fine now.
And now I get the following error when installing the print driver:
"The specified print monitor is unknown"
UPDATE I got my VM with an old (but vanilla) copy of Windows XP installed on it. I couldn't get procmon working or any of the sofware suggested installed because it's only running sp0 (ie no service packs). However Regshot appears to work. So I took a Regshot before I installed the driver, and I took a Regshot after I installed the driver and then listed the comparison listed below:
(Paste-bin of changes: http://pastebin.com/VEJhMXde)
So I now am wondering if there is an easier way to remove these keys than just looking for all 647 of them. Is there some type of utility that will take a list of the keys and remove them?