The question I need to ask is has anyone heard of getting a "driver not installed" error when clicking on a printer's properties on Windows 7, and is there a workaround?

Here are the details of the problem.

One of our users has a Windows 7 desktop, and an HP LaserJet 4050 T connected to via a parallel-to-usb converter. The PLC5 universal driver was installed for series 4050 printers.

I needed to install the PLC 6 driver, which completed successfully. The user is an administrator of the system, and I was prompted to and accepted running as Administrator to install the driver.

After the install, I went to see the 4050's properties and was prompted that the PLC6 driver was not installed. I believe the PLC6 driver was installed, because the PLC5 driver resulted in receiving an official HP error page indicating the printer was "not set up for collating" as the second page of printing two copies of a one page email. This problem did not occur with the PLC 6 driver.

Oddly enough, setting back to PLC5 produced the same error about the PLC5 driver not being installed. I ignored/dismissed the error box (did not re-install the driver), and reproduced the error, with the second page being the HP not set up for collating error page.

Any thoughts on what is causing this and how to clear it would be appreciated. The closest fix I could find was on a Microsoft tech page, and they had me clear winsock out of a Administrator run command line, followed by a reboot. That did not fix the problem.

I have also found this

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/5101195b-3aca-4699-9a06-db4578614e2d/changing-driver-results-in-printer-driver-is-not-installed-error-on-server-2008?forum=winserverprint

and will look into trying some of these suggestions, which appear to me to be a "shotgun" approach to fixing the problem.