About 2 months ago I set up VB on a Win 7 Host to run an XP Guest. An inkjet and an impact printer are each separately cabled to the computer directly thru USB 2.0 and LPT1 ports, respectively. Both work fine under Win 7, but the impact printer will only print from the XP Guest if I have accessed VB from the Win 7 Host non-administrator account. If I open VB from the Host administrator account and try to print from the XP Guest with the impact printer, it won't print and I get an error message, “out of paper”. The printer info (properties, etc) appears identical in XP regardless of which Host account it was opened under. The name of the printer shows the same and it claims it is “Ready” in either case. But it won't print from Word Pad, won't print a test page and won't print from the command prompt. The inkjet, however, works fine from XP Guest under both Host accounts.
I'm baffled. I repeat, all the printer setup info appears the same under both accounts, but the printer just isn't getting the message when I have initially logged into the Host as Admin. In the XP OS, I only have the single default Admin account. I've deleted the printer and re-installed under Admin Host, XP Guest but it didn't fix the problem.
I know, legacy printers working out of LPT ports are iffy, but this one (Epson LQ 1070 ESC/P2) works fine except as stated above. I really need to use it when logged into Win7 as Admin. Thank you for any suggestions.