I've been plugging away at this problem for the past 3 hours and it's frustrating the hell out of me. I have a home network with 3 computers hard-wired into a DLink DL624 wireless router and also occasionally we'll connect two laptops wirelessly. All machines are running XP and are attached to the same Windows workgroup for file sharing.

One of the hard-wired computers is used as a print server for printing from the laptops. My wife hasn't been able to print for a couple of days with an error error that said the printer was either not connected or was turned off, but the server and printer are actually up and running. The printer works fine; it's a connectivity issue. The printer status in her laptop said "connecting..." Apparently, her laptop could not find the spooler service is on the server. I fired up my laptop and got the same error as well.

I deleted the printer from her laptop and tried reinstalling it fresh as a network printer. What's unusual is that the computer name of the server shows up in the network browser, so her laptop is seeing it, but the shared printer name does not appear. Laptop will not see the printer. Friggin' weird. I then went to the sever and unshared then reshared the printer with a different name, but there was no change. Printer is still invisible to other computer despite being enabled as shared.

I can ping back and forth between laptops and server. I thought my Zone Alarm firewall appliance might have been the problem since I installed an upgrade recently on the server. I am using the WinXP SP2 firewall on her laptop, McAfee Internet Security Enterprise on my laptop. I combed through the entire ZoneAlarm User Forum and doublechecked all the possible firewall configuration issues (LAN network and spoolsvc.exe must be in trusted zone, etc.), but found nothing that solved the problem.

Not only can't I see the shared printer, I can't see any shared folders on the server for any other networked computer. I see the name of the server when I bring it in through the network places folder, but I can't drill any futher down. There is something blocking it.

Any of you techies have any ideas? I could see myself spending another 5 hours tomorrow night, this time reading through the DLink Forum message threads on shared printer problems and probably getting no where.

I'd much rather be doing my FFL Draft Day research...

Meanwhile the wife is getting really pissed that she can't print from her laptop from wherever she's at in the house.

It's a rather obscure problem, but thanks in advance if someone has a solution.