A couple of weeks ago I presented with a printing problem - in
essence, though the software apparently installed correctly, a newly
purchased Epson R2880 would not print. All seemed well until the
final hitting of the Print button when it would go away and think for
a bit, quite normal, then pause. An associated fault was that access
to CUPS (localhost:631 in Safari) went to the start page but would go
no further.
A Tiger installation on my Macbook printed faultlessly, confirming the
integrity of the printer and its cables.
All the obvious suggestions came back and were tried:-
Make sure it is the right driver
Repair permissions
Run Disk Warrior
Run the combo 10.5.4 update
Reinstall the driver all this to no avail.
I then discovered that after starting up in safe boot mode,
uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, everything worked, the
printer was fine and I could access CUPS in full. Rebooting normally
resulted in printer pausing again and CUPS no longer accessible.
Through all this, two other printers were 100%, one directly on USB
and the other in the USB port of Airport Extreme.
Apple could offer no real help and Epson confirmed that they had no
known issues with 10.5.4 and this printer.
Next step was a clean install of 10.5.1 on second internal SATA disk
(after considerable reshuffling!). The bare 10.5.1 (also 10.5.2,
10.5.3, 10.5.4) was fine in that the printer printed and I could
access CUPS. However as soon as I migrated applications, documents
and the like back, the fault reappeared.
Back to the original system I started removing al the third party
unnecessary items, including Intego Virus Barrier and Net Barrier,
more than 20 of these useful but non-essentials, fonts pared back to
bare minimum, all Widgets removed, all to no effect.
In this I used the excellent utility, AppCleaner which removes,
hopefully, all the associated files as well as the application. The
final stage was to look at all the extensions, styled "Other" in
AppCleaner. Many of these are not readily identifiable but last
night at about 11.00o'clock I hit the jackpot with eMusic.plugin. I
used eMusic some time ago under Tiger but no longer use it and had
thrown away it's smart download software leaving this last bit of
detritus lurking from at least a year back. I guess if I had
reinstalled all the applications from scratch and just brought in my
Documents I would have got there too. Fortunately, while all this
was happening, everything was functional and life was able to go on
normally, apart from patches of my hair strewn here and there around
the place!
The moral of this salutory tale, which I will always observe
rigorously in future, is to completely "Uninstall" unwanted programs.
I found AppCleaner easy to use and efficient for this task, Version
Tracker lists several similar utilities.
My thanks to all, especially Robert Howells and Ronni Brown, who
applied their minds to this long drawn out problem on my behalf.
Severin Crisp
By the way, I love the new printer!
________________________________________________________
Assoc Professor R Severin Crisp, FIP, CPhys, FAIP
15 Thomas St, Mount Clarence, Albany, 6330, Western Australia.
Phone (08) 9842 1950 (Int'l +61 8 9842 1950)
email mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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