Plotter disappears when selected

On one machine in our office, when the user selects a particular plotter
name on the Plot Device tab, the plotter will be set to None, and the
selected plotter is now missing from the drop down list. This happens
on two of our laser printers that we have configured, but none of the
others in the list. It only happens on the one machine, and all the
other computers on the network are fine. The pc3 files are shared on
the network. The files in the DRV directory are the same as the ones on
my machine (which is fine). Any ideas on what might be causing it?

AutoCAD 2002 sp1, Win XP.

Thanks in advance for your assistance,
Danny Polkinhorn
WATG
Honolulu

 

Dean,

Thanks for your reply. It turns out that the underlying windows printer
associated with the pc3 file had a bad driver.

For the benefit of others:

We set up two printers on the server for the one device. The pc3 file
uses the PCL driver for the printer, while all other windows printing,
like from Word for example, uses a Postscript driver. So, I didn't even
notice that the problem resulted from a problem with the windows
printer, because he never used the PCL driver outside of AutoCAD. When
you open go to the printer Properties in windows and attempt to print a
test page, the test fails. The solution involves adding a local printer
of the same type, prompting windows to install a new driver instead of
pulling it from the server. After doing this, all other printers of the
same type, including the server based printers, will use the fresh
driver. Windows printer fixed, AutoCAD printer no longer disappears.

Thanks,
Danny