Disclaimer: this text contains "graphical image". Reader discretion is advised.

This is something I haven't been able to solve in Windows 95, Windows 95b (or whatever), Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and I don't have the Vista anymore so at least that one won't bite me.

The scenario is as follows:

Something goes wrong while printing. The paper jams or runs out, and when I fix that, the printer won't continue no matter which buttons I press. It's a Winprinter (HP 920cvr, but I've had other printers and they're all the same in this respect). So at some point printer can't continue, I turn it off, and I forget that the file printed (i.e. its graphical image) is still queued, and that Windows won't bother to restart printing or to at least start with a fresh page sequence after the last good page, no matter that the communication is bidirectional (at least the utilities I got with the printer use the cable that way - it's a classic Centronix, not USB). So the printer goes through its initialization, reports to Windows that it's ready, and gets hit with a few dozen kilobytes of binary. Since it didn't receive proper commands to get into graphic mode, it interprets the binaries as ASCII, which is all very interesting but unusable. After a few lines of this Courier (why always Courier? I hate that) gobbledygook it encounters a FF (after a few LFs or CRs, which do behave as the legend says), ejects a sheet, devours another, prints more. I try to recycle after about six pages, when I understand what's going on, but no help - it obviously ejects after maybe 100-200 bytes, so it'd print about a thousand pages before it runs out of ink or gets smashed by a blunt object.

Ah, but why do we have print queue? We had them in all the Windowses, didn't we? Ok...control panel, printer, click my Cvrle (you wouldn't believe how many machines in our household have names), and there it is, our daughter's homework paused. Good - I know it was nearly impossible to kill an active print job, but a paused one should be a different matter.

After about four rightclick-cancel-areyousure-yesIam cycles, I give up and just watch. It takes about six minutes to erase a file and clear a queue. Once upon a time, the waiters were the slowest service on Earth, and then they invented computers. If it was waiting for confirmation from my daughter whether she'd allow me to cancel her printjob, it didn't ask for one. Besides, on this machine, she's Guest and I'm Admin.

Morale of the story:
- somebody will propose a third party tool, which will be incompatible with something else. No go - not because of compatibility with the Windows (which are flawed already), but because I don't want to replace one problem with another.
- don't ever let the printer go hungry or you'll waste 20 sheets of paper and about a kilometer of neural tissue
- dig up that extra FreeBsd machine and hook it up as a server. Hook the printer to it (dunno if that'd work, this is a winprinter)
- remember the RPTI network, Lantastic or any version of Novell, when any print job had the decency to stay shot when it's shot. No Terminator/Krüger/cheap horror resurrections. Reminisce and sigh.