Another problem I've had with this upgrade is printer/scanner screw-ups. I have a CanoScan FP 620P scanner hooked up through my parallel port and a Canon BJ-5100 hooked up through the pass-through port on the scanner. It worked without a hitch with my Win98 setup, so I foresaw no problems with my newer supposedly-better OS. Hooked up my scanner first, installed the drivers, worked no probs. But when I hooked up my printer and installed the drivers, it didn't work at all. Argh! After fucking around with various driver installations [and discovering WinXP doesn't support either device at all!], I uninstalled both my scanner and printer drivers, then reinstalled my printer drivers first this time. Yes, it seemed to work.

But not really. When you first boot up, you can use your scanner, no problem. But after you use your printer even once, the scanner stops working, giving you an error message on startup. Apparently, the printer drivers won't relinquish control of the parallel port after printing, cutting off access to the scanner. Eeek! Canon's response seems to be that you should buy a new USB printer or a parallel port-to-USB adapter. Shit, I bought this hardware from them, it works fine, it's a good design, tying up only one port for two devices. [And all my USB ports are currently in use, so I would have to buy a USB hub] You can't use the scanner and printer at the same time, but for a single user computer, this has never really been a problem. Besides, they had it working fine for Win98, what's preventing them from doing the same for Win2000? I am not impressed.

After much Googling, I did not find many answers. Some people recommend that you reboot Win2000 every time you want to use your scanner. Ha! Not likely. I found a couple workarounds. First, if you want to use your scanner to print a bunch of documents, pause your printer, scan and print your documents, and when you're done, un-pause the printer and let it print all the documents at once. And keep your fingers crossed that you don't get a paper jam that wrecks the whole process. The problem with this approach is that you still lose the use of your scanner as soon as you start printing. Which brings me to my second workaround, stopping and restarting the print spooler. After restarting the print spooler you get the use of your scanner again. I wrote a batch file and created a shortcut to it on my desktop. Very short:

net stop spooler
net start spooler

Obviously, this is an ugly hack and it takes a couple seconds for the spooler to shut down and start up again. But hey, I get to keep using my old, obsolete scanner that works perfectly fine and does everything I've ever asked of it. I wonder if there is some way [perhaps through a registry hack?] to get the printer driver to surrender control of the parallel port once it's done printing. Like it did in Win98 you know?