One of our offices has a Lexmark T650n printer set up to be "shared" by two users (User A and User B). The users sit beside each other with the printer located between them. The printer was installed / configured by the vendor / supplier 2+ years ago.
Recently, the two users asked if I could "stop the printer from printing two pages every time User A shut down her computer at end of day".
This seemed to be very odd behaviour, so when I next attended onsite at this office, I tried to replicate the issue. Logged in on User A's system, and printed a test page to verify printer connectivity. Test page printed fine. Restarted the system... and when Windows shut down, a single page printed, with a single character at the top left corner - a capital N with a tilde above it. When Windows was starting up, a second page printed, with this text:
"P{heart}{diamond}ReadBreak"
(note the actual graphic symbol printed for the words in squiggly brackets).
This behaviour was replicated every time I shut down and restarted the computer (tried 3 times).
Asked Users how long this has been occurring, reply was "oh, ever since the printer was installed..." - that is, for 2+ years.
Had User B print a test page - printed successfully. Compared the printed settings for User A and User B - and User A was connected to the T650n via a local USB port while User B was connected via a standard TCP/IP port to the NIC installed in the printer... light bulb!
I disconnected the USB cable from the printer and reconfigured User A to use a standard TCP/IP port. Shut down & restarted computer (no pages printed!), and on restart printed a test page successfully to the printer. Shut down and restarted three more times, with no pages printing.
Issue resolved... however I checked with Lexmark tech support on the issue of having the printer accepting print jobs from both a local USB port and a network TCP/IP port, and they said the T650n was designed to work this way... seems odd to me. I have not seen dual connections on a network printer before. Either configure all computers to print to the TCP/IP port, or configure the USB port to be a shared printer on the peer to peer LAN.
Since removing the USB port appears to have "fixed" the issue, I am just looking for some technical background from my peers on Spiceworks as to how they would deal with a similar situation...
Does anyone else have experience with the T650n printer specifically, configured for both USB local and TCP/IP network connections? Or, with other printers configured like this? Is it okay to configure a network printer like this?
Thanks in advance for all replies...