MS Office crashing with HP Printer Driver

[Mark Hoy]

I've seen this posted many different places, but no solution to the problem has been offered.

I have a HP DeskJet 5740 that is connected to a Linksys PSUS4 print server / switch, and the latest HP 5700 series drivers installed on both my Windows 2000 workstation and my XP Pro SP2 machine, and the same behavior happens...

whenever, for whatever reason (probably a fault on the PSUS4) the printer cannot be seen (or is believed to be in offline status), a few seconds after I start MS Word (both Word 2000 and Word 2003), it will crash. Launching the debugger, it says that there was a memory access error (trying to access address 0x00000000 - i.e. null pointer error) in the file hpzpm310.dll.

Now, some suggestions (that seem to work so far) is to make sure that the default printer is not set to the networked printer (i.e. the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer). What it appears to do is to try and format the current document with the default printer settings... Hence, if it cannot talk to the printer, it'll crash.

Now, there has to be a permanant fix for this... HP Tech Support? Microsoft? Each one can blame the other, but it seems to me that at least on HP's side of things, they can at least make it so it won't crash within their .dll file.

[Omar Senussi]

Mark,
Try disabling bidirectional support if it is on? see if that helps.