When I tried to install a printer on several Windows XP machines, I got this error message constantly.
Cannot install printer. The print processor does not exist.
System reboot doesn’t help and the strange thing is that network printer installation is fine. The printer I tried to install already has a driver on the system. When I tried to install it , it asked me if I want to keep the existing driver and I clicked Yes. The fix is instead of keeping the driver, you choose to copy over the existing drivers.
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I recently ran in to the same problem when trying to install a Lexmark driver under XP.
After a little research, it turns out that print processors are stored in the directory at:
%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\spool\prtprocs\w32x86
For some reason, my installation was not putting the print processor that was required into this directory. I luckily had a working installation that I could look at.
If you right click on a working version of the printer and select “Properties” and then select the Advanced tab, there is a button at the bottom that says “Print Procesor”. If you click it, it shows you the current print processor.
I just copied the print processor DLL from the print processor directory on the working machine to the corresponding directory on the non-working machine and after that I could create the printer without any problems.
Later I determined that you can also look in the .inf file for the installation for the “PrintProcessor=” line to see the name of the required print processor. You then might be able to find it on the installation disk and copy it. It may be compressed, in which case I’m not sure what you do.
i tried to install printer hp 1022 on windows machine, a message show cannot install printer, printer processor does not exist what i,ll do.
Thank you. The fixed worked perfectly….
After 3 weeks of breaking my head I finaly fix this problem.
This is the solution:
In my case the problem computer was the one attach to the printer so this what I did:
Rename the folder w32x86.
c:\windows\system32\spool\prtprocs\w32x86
then copy the same folder from one of the good computer into this same location on the problem computer, now is working just fine.
Hope this works on you