Hi Group,


My group just completed an ASP.NET based solution.  The core of the
solution
has to do with printing final reports after review of data.  We are
using
Crystal Reports.NET for our reports...with our reports based on SQL
Server
2000 stored procedures.  The web server is a Windows 2000 server
machine.

 After going live, we've encountered HUGE problems, relating to
printing.
Since the system is a web based app, used in an Intranet scenario, what
we've done is to have every workstation printer installed on the web
server,
so that print jobs can be spooled to such printer from the server, using
the
.PrintToPrinter method of the CrystallDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine
namespace, something like:

 oRpt.PrintOptions.PrinterName=3D"\\mypc002\hpljet1200";

oRpt.PrintToPrinter(1,false,0,0);

 Now, there are about 4 or 5 workstation printers installed on the
server,
most of the printers are HPs, like the 4000, 1100, 1200, etc

 Here are the problems we've been having: There are times (almost
randomly)
when printing would fail with errors like:

1. Cannot submitting job for background processing

2. Request cancelled by user

3. Browser just hangs up there, like it's doing something, but never
does

4. Print job would get spooled, but there would be an "Error Printing"
message on the client machine.

 The interesting thing is that the error is not consistent...most times,
after uninstalling the drivers and trying a bunch of things, it would
start
working - only for a while though...and it would stop again, with one of
the
above errors.

 We have been trying to resolve this issue through different means, and
we're not at the bottom of it yet...I thought maybe there is somebody
out
there experiencing this, or maybe I'm just missing something.

 Last week, we put in place a work-around by exporting the report to PDF
format and using ActivePDF's activeX tool to spool to the printer, but
this
is not ideal at all...and is not even dependable.

  Something else to note too is that we were getting some weird errors
in
the Event viewer that suggested that something is causing the system
(the
web server) to periodically update the HP printer drivers with Windows
NT
drivers sometimes, and Windows 2000 drivers sometimes. After seeing
this,
last week, we went down the road of setting up 2 servers...putting NT
clients on one server, and 2000 clients on the other server (under the
assumption that the problem is caused by conflicts of having some users
with
windows NT, as such Windows NT drivers for the printers...and others
with
Windows 2000 Pro, as such windows 2000 Pro drivers - since the server
has to
have all the drivers to be able to print to all of the client printers)

 We saw the the problem happens mostly with the HP 1200 printers...and
we
tried using the generic HP drivers like the HP 5...as such, we
discovered
that the 1200s won't allow that, since they use the weird DOT4 ports,
rather
than LPT ports...now, we're tending to think that the whole problem
occurs
when you have one of these printers installed on the server with the
DOT4
ports.  Today, I'm removing those HP1200s and having all users on
standard
printers like the HP1100s.  So far today, it's been working fine for the
most part...but we'll see...

Hope this makes sense. Crystal Decisions tech support couldn't
help...they said it's probably due to the way crpe32.dll handles it's
printing or something weird like that

Thanks for any help/suggestions - I'm going crazy...and I'm sure you can
guess how my users are feeling...

Bunmi Akinyemiju