I ran into this problem the other day while trying to print from a laptop running Windows Vista to a PC that was running Windows XP. The XP machine had a USB printer that was being shared and was visible on the network. I installed the shared printer through the Add a printer function as a network printer on the Vista machine and it installed without error. When I tried printing something to the newly installed printer nothing happened, no error, nothing…

The print job shows in the queue on the Vista machine but there is nothing in the queue on the XP machine. I double checked all the settings and permissions for the shared printer. Everything was set correctly but I still could not print from the Vista machine to the XP machine.

After a little research I found out that there is a glitch that occasionally surfaces when trying to print from a Vista machine to a shared printer on an XP machine. This glitch or bug has no official fix that I could find but there is a work around.

Solution:

1. Go to your Start Menu then choose Printers.
2. Click on Add a Printer.
3. Choose Add a local printer.
4. Choose Create a new port and make sure that the drop down has Local Port selected then click Next.
5. A pop-up box appears with the title Port Name and prompts you to Enter a port name:. In that box enter the share name (\\computer-name\printer-name) of the printer you wish to use. For example if the computer name is xpbox1 and the printer name is sharedusbprinter2 then you would enter: \\xpbox1\sharedusbprinter2
6. Then click OK.
7. Install the driver for the printer you are trying to add by either choosing one of the pre-installed drivers in the list or clicking on Have Disk and installing the driver manually.
8. On the next screen type in a name for the printer and choose whether you want this to be your default printer or not.
9. You have successfully installed the printer, click the Print a test page button and the printer should print.
10. Click Finish.