tibbetts's Journal: Yours Truly vs. Mac OS X & HP DeskJet 960c

Round One

I'm cursed. In October, I decided to retire the trusty but suddenly-unsupported StyleWriter 1200 and bought an HP DeskJet 960c printer (for an awesome deal, but that's another story). I downloaded the OS X drivers (v. 1.0), and everything was hunky-dory. A couple of weeks later, though, the proverbial shit hit the fan. Whenever I tried to print something, or brought up the Print Center to change the printer's settings, Classic would try to open, Print Center would suddenly quit with an "unexpected error", and the console would be littered with messages like "loginwindow: Could not connect to "RulebookServer"" and more. I tried everything--reinstalling the HP drivers (1.0 & 1.2), Mac OS X 10.1.1 and 10.1.2, but nothing worked. After about two months of trying, I gave up, bought a new internal drive, and started from scratch.

Round Two

The second time around, I vowed to be more careful in how I installed updates. I didn't upgrade OS X beyond the base 10.1, and I gingerly applied the two HP driver updates, testing the printouts each time before moving to the next one. So far, so good. Printing is pretty decent, but you cannot imagine the fear that I feel whenever I start a print job and wait for Print Center to open without also starting Classic. As of last night at 11 p.m., everything looked good. How long can it last?

Lingering Questions

I still get the RulebookServer problems in the logs, as well as stack dumps for some tool called makequeues, which lives in the Print Center.app Contents directory. What is it? Why does it fail many times in any given session? How can it possibly be related to Classic?

Who has the answers?