I've been playing around with mini/micro computers since before the PC. One of the things that seemed to be always there is the ability to print things, even just dumps. We never gave much thought to the fact that, though the driver might be bad, at least something would get printed.

So...

My main desktop started acting up. It's a dual boot XP/Win7 configuration and I think I know what's wrong, but in the meantime I plopped down a spare SFF Dell I had that runs XP that I know is fully firewalled/antivirus/malware. I wasn't going to use it for long, and just for the normal dipstick stuff I do.

The printer I had on the other machine is a small laser printer that has worked flawlessly for a long time. I hooked it up, but was unable to communicate with it (parallel port - it's that old ). Replaced the PP cable with a USB->Parallel cable. Same result.

When I try to add a printer, I get the message "Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running". What?

Well, it was down the rabbit hole from there. Google reveals that there are a lot of people who have this problem (and not just with XP) and the proposed solutions often don't work.

It would seem that this could be a serious problem, but I've never heard of it before.

I don't want to detail all the blind alleys I've gone down (including some freeware tools and advice from Microsoft), but this seems bizarre - I mean - computer -> printer, been doing this since the '50's. How can something this basic and simple fall so flat?