Last week, the system disk crashed on a Windows PC.
This PC was connected to a data acquisition device (an Ultraviolet Camera) and the users were hoping for a quick repair.
Within a couple of days we had purchased a replacement disk of the same size. The pre-crash system had been
running Windows 2000 and data acquisition software named Labworks from UVP (http://www.uvp.com/).
A check of the UVP website showed that an updated version of Labworks for XP was now available,
so I decided to install Windows XP on the new disk since Windows 2000 is now dated and no longer getting
updated by Microsoft.
Things went well, other than a couple of false starts in getting the proper camera driver identified and installed,
and by the next day the system was back in operation, running Windows XP and Labworks v4.6,
and being tested by the users.
The system also has a Mitsubishi thermal printer (model P91D) so I installed the driver for that, and it printed
fine. The users mentioned that they needed to export the results to Excel, so I installed MS Office 2003 with
all updates (the old system had Office XP).
The problem
A new problem was discovered within a day. Whenever anyone attempted to print anything from the Labworks
aplication, the program would crash without even displaying the printer selection dialog. At the same time,
printing from other applications (e.g. Notepad) was working fine.
This was a puzzling problem, because neither the application nor the printer are widely used, and it seemed
like there might be a bug in the XP version of Labworks.
The solution
Luckily I stumbled upon the solution while doing a web search. A recent posting on TechRepublic
(
http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=101&threadID=209133&messageID=2157022) seemed
to point to two Office 2003 updates, specifically
KB923094 and
KB923091 as being the cause of this problem.
The timing of the crash also seemed to coincide with installation of Office 2003,
Looking in Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs, I could not readily identify these updates, so I decided
to take the next step and uninstall Office 2003, and installed Office XP (2002) instead.
This has solved the problem, and the Print Dialog no longer crashes.
Anyone experiencing unexplained crashes when the Print dialog is launched may want to check if they have
MS Office 2003 to thank (or rather, some recent updates to Office 2003).
Comments
(in order from older to newest)
