Mac OS X - "Error While Printing" from all apps

[DCheng]

Dear All,

I'm running Mac OS X 10.3 on my iMac G4. I have a HP Colour LaserJet 2500 Series attached to it by USB, and a couple of days before, a standard (non-admin) account couldn't print. When I tried to, the APPLICATION said "Error while printing". A couple minutes of fiddling proved unsuccesful so I just put it over to the admin account and it worked.

Days later, the error happened to me. It was really maddening. It seems that even Installer doesn't work now. I Googled around and found a couple of Mac forums had had these problems before but no solution.

I repaired my disk permissions already and it still doesn't work. I don't recall updating my system before this problem occured.

Something does work. If I drag the printer to my dock, some files do print when I open them with my printer.

Here are my specs just to be safe:

Mac OS X 10.3.9, 1.25 GHz PPC G4, 512 MB DDR SDRAM

Thanks in advance,
DCheng

[Edit]
I found http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107396 at Apple's support page and it pretty much matches my problem completely. When I follow the help, it still doesn't work. I even did what I should do for 10.2 in the CLI but to no avail.

Everytime I try to repair my permissions I get the same stuff, stuff about my ColorSync Profile, something about spool and jobs or something like that (to do with printers?). I had fiddled with my coloursync profiles before everything screwed up, I remember that.
[/Edit]

[nihil]

I don't know much about Macs but a friend who uses them suggests this:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14641

"Printer setup repair"

[DCheng]

nihil,

Sorry about the late reply. I live in HK and plus I lost my password this morning. What are the chances! Anyway.

Thanks a lot for the link. I'll try it out.

I know that this forum runs largely on people running Linuxs and Windows, but I read somewhere a symbolic link on a Mac to
/tmp (from private/tmp) was needed and if this was lost the problems I had would occur. This doesn't seem to be there when I ls -h my drive, but the repair programs say it's there...

Any ideas? Does Unix have anything like that?

Thanks a lot for the help so far,
DCheng

[nihil]

Well,

Another thing you might try is to:

1. Set up another user with permissions (default) to that printer.
2. Set up the printer as another printer, with default settings.

Please let me know how you get on.