Printer Issue

I have a printer showing up in my printers folder. Not sure where it came from or how it got there. But would really appreciate some help in getting rid of it.
Cannot delete it using any method that I'm familar with. Just keeps saying "Needs Troubleshooting" which when run produces no solutions.
It's not present in device manager (hidden devices, both methods)
It's not present in the registry.
It doesn't have any documents pending in queue.
It doesn't have a queue.
When I stop the spooler service and refresh the view in the printers folder, all printers disappear as they should, except this one. See attachment.
If anyone has had any experience with this issue or would just care to post a possible best guess at a solution I would appreciate it.
Thanks
Randy

It's pretty unusual to see you looking for help you are usually one giving it. Has this PC been networked? That could possibly explain where it came from. Is there more that one user account or are you using any VMs? Just a few thought of where it might have sneaked in.
Joe

Yes the computer is networked however there are no other printers attached to any other network node in the house. The HP 990cxi, is a USB hosted printer attached directly to this computer and works perfectly and is the only printer available on the network to any network node. The problem device seems to be some kind of clone of the real hp 990, with a different name.
However, I did attempt to contact Mike earlier since I know we both run VMware Workstation 7, and I was thinking, as you seem to be, that perhaps this might be a product of or an artifact from one of my guest operating systems somehow left on the VMware Workstation host machine, but I'm just not sure how something like that could actually happen, especially with all the guest OSs turned off and the application not running and the services set to manual and currently stopped. That is still an avenue I will investigate further, hopefully Mike will get back to me later and may have some idea if it's related to VMware or not.
Just thought I would throw it out there to see if anyone else had seen anything like it before. Most of the reference regarding the printer with the yellow triangle deal (Needs Troubleshooting) seems to have been related to docs stuck in the queue but that isn't the case in this particular instance.
Thanks for taking the time to read my post and offer your suggestions. I'm certain it's not an issue with networking, but the VM idea is an excellent place for me to start and I will indeed follow-up on that.
It's not eating no hay, so I'm not in a hair on fire state about the issue. It's just one of those things that you just don't want to leave unresolved. I'm sure you as well as other members can appreciate that.
Thanks Joe
Randy

I will assume you have done 2 things, done a cold boot and searched the registry for that entry. I would suggest looking for ghost entries, but printers do not show up in device manager.

In earlier Windows, some devices showed up in safe mode, perhaps you could try that.

And remember, if this is a multi-function device, it may not be the printer component.

Thanks for the input Clark. I will definitely pursue the registry search after while. Right now I'm trying to get with Mike, the site seems to be gradually slowing down, and we're trying to track down the issue.
Thanks Again
Randy

I agree it is slowing down. You think the site could be set up to annotate the OP in threads?

Originally Posted by Saltgrass

I agree it is slowing down. You think the site could be set up to annotate the OP in threads?

Thanks for the suggestion.
We've actually talked about this in the past and I don't remember what the disposition of that discussion was, so I will bring it up again with Mike again and see what's required and if it's do-able. I actually like that feature so I'll see what the verdict is and let you know.

Update on my reason for starting this thread.
As I noted in an earlier post, the problem device seemed to be almost a clone of the real printer, but did not behave as such, but I decided to completely remove the real physical HP Deskjet 990c drivers and all and interestingly enough after doing so the problem device reverted to something else entirely as depicted in attachment "WierdPrinter2".

Still no obvious solution at hand, so I rebooted the computer, thinking I would be greeted with the "Found New Hardware Wizard" to reinstall the printer but no such thing happened.

So I opened the printers folder once again and found that it was thinking itself a printer again, but still had an exclamation mark/yellow triangle (Needs Troubleshooting) and still with the slightly irregular name of DeskJet 990C rather that the correct name (driver generated) of hp deskjet 990c, so I ran the troubleshooter again and this time it detected (remarkably) that there was a driver issue.
So I choose to "Apply this fix" from within the troubleshooter and allowed windows update to go out and get the driver (located here if anyone ever needs them Microsoft Update Catalog) as HP has never released any driver updates for this printer but the old ones work well on Win7 64bit.

I'm happy to report that the problem is resolved as depicted in attachment "WeirdPrinter3) and even the actual name of the printer is correct now.
I have no idea what caused this issue but I thought I would follow-up with the steps I performed to resolve it in the event that anyone else has a similar problem.
Thanks for all who contributed suggestions as I was out of ideas and if nothing else they helped me chase this issue further to a solution that worked for me.
Randy

Originally Posted by Saltgrass

You think the site could be set up to annotate the OP in threads?

Mike has added the OP tracker that you requested to the forum. He is currently working on an image to encapsulate the text to make it more obvious but as you can see the text "Original Poster" follows the OP through the thread.
Hope this is what you were looking for and
Thank you Mike.
Randy