Ricoh MP W2400 with Windows Vista

One of my clients uses this wide format printer. After switching to Vista on his work station he had intermittent problems printing. The print job would do everything normally, but simply would not print or show up in the queue, and no error was generated.

We still had a Windows XP machine on the same network, and it had no problems. Thus far I haven’t found the actual problem, though I’ve pretty much isolated it to the printer driver for Vista, but I did find a workaround. Those faster than I am have probably seen it already.

I shared the printer on the XP machine and then print to that shared printer from the Vista machine. The setup speed is not noticeably different, and time from queuing the print job until the printer starts to print is substantially shorter.

It seems unlikely that anyone else is having exactly the same problem, but just in case, I thought I’d post this solution.