CompuServe Thread

Okay, here's the situation. I have an HP4 with a Jet Direct card on the TBase10 little Lan here. Three machines are NT. 2 are 3.51, one is 3.5. The 66mhz 486 is my "server" in that I have everyone printing via that machine. Lately, my NT 3.51 90mhz Pentium machine has been doing weird things in printing from Word 6.0a. It's gotten slow. But only in the HP4 mode. When I go to HP4 Post Script, everything just fine. So I looked closely and found that in sending from the one machine to the other, the file size (looking at Print Manager) gets gigantic. I mean, a 90 page film script, pure text, balloons to 20 megs on printing. Ah-ha! So there's the problem. But why is it doing that? I tried to access the HP4 directly from the 90mhz machine (rather than sending the print job to the "server") and everything was fine and dandy. Okay, since I can't figure out the problem in sending it to the "server", this will have to do. (And I tried; no, I'm not sending text as graphics, or any of that stuff.) Then, yesterday, I try printing to the HP4 directly, and it no print. I get under "status" on the Print Manager: unavailable. Nothing I do will get it to print. I remove that printer. I create another one. (And this is in ALL printing, not just Word.) It's gotten weirder and worse. I got the printing going on the 90mhz 3.51 NT machine by copying files from the System32\spool\drivers\w32x86\1 from the "server" machine. But not the "server" machine can't print and neither can my 3rd NT machine, the one with 3.5. Same problem: prints to Print Manager, then the status changes to Not Available. I checked the Event Viewers on the various machines, I found that on the ones that don't print, I get in the App Log an informational error. Source: hpmon. Event: 1044. Lost connection with address [jet direct port #]. Printing will continue when the connection is re-established. The only consistent thing I can see that happened–and it's a longshot–is that the new AOL beta software (2.5)–hey, I got friends on the service, don't laugh–which upon exiting gives a screwup with the KRNL386.EXE file has corrupted something. I know it sounds paranoid, but thats the only common denominator I can find. Did that cause anything? I tried it on the other two machines (the ones that went bad, before they went bad) and now they don't work. I refuse to try it on my printing machine, for fear of losing everything. I tried using the emergency disk on everything; I tried copying whole subdirectories from the working machine to the broken ones. I reinstalled all network software from the NT CD. No go. It's very frustrating and completely baffling. Please!!! If someone can help!!! Mark Zaslove