I have a machine, that when I run the add new printer wizard it seems to be stuck on only displaying 4-5 signed drivers but none of the included windows drivers like “generic” somehow, reboots, repair installs, system restores have zero effect.
Xp pro 32-bit so far searching for a way to release/restore the full driver list has been futile as there are hundreds of thousands of issues with printer drivers and sifting through this is getting long and I have a retail store down for want of the full driver list.
This has to be a registry setting but my google-fu is insufficent
any printdriver/spooler subsystem gurus in the house
I haven’t seen this particular problem before but a couple of quick thoughts:
Check your System Properties - Hardware - Driver Signing and see if it’s blocking the ability to install unsigned drivers.
Can you complete the add printer wizard, just using one of the limited set of drivers it displays? If so, what happens when you right-click that printer, choose Properties, go to the Advanced tab and either hit the driver dropdown arrow or click the New Driver button and point to the NTPRINT.INF file (that’s the file containing the jillion “standard” printer drivers in WinXP)? You should find that file under c:\windows\inf.
If you’ve been through restarts I don’t imagine this will help but you can restart the Print Spooler service.
Find ntprint.inf and check the last modified date - is it very recent (i.e. about when this problem started) or older?
On mine the file is about 1400kb. Open it up and you should see a great big list of printer models. If your file is really small, was last modified this week and only shows the four models of printer you’re seeing that would mean that ntprint.inf got hosed.
You mentioned that you did a system restore - how far back did you go? If you don’t have a restore point from before when this problem happened you could try copying ntprint.inf from a known good machine or PM me and I can email you a copy of my file.