A shot in the dark

Poststructural Pub
1

I worked all day with a technical support person on this, to no avail, but I’m hoping that maybe some of you wonderful tech-savvy people may have some idea as to how to help me.

I bought a new printer (HP Office Pro 8000) on Saturday, and have been trying to install it ever since. As soon as it gets to a certain point in the install, I get a fatal error message: “The file “bufferchm” is being used by another program and cannot be removed” (Error number 1714). This, of course, terminates the installation.

I went to the Hewlett-Packard support website and found this error for my printer (evidently the specific file that can’t be removed varies…it’s the message itself that matters). I downloaded the patch that was supposed to fix the problem, but no luck. That page also said that there’s a workaround involving choosing the basic, rather than the full-featured, installation, but the installation software I got doesn’t have that option.

I then spent literally five hours in on-line chat with a very helpful tech support guy. I can’t remember everything we did…I know we cleaned up my registry files, installed a newer version of Java, and tried doing the installation from drivers downloaded from HP. No luck. At one point we did get the printer to install (apparently), and even successfully printed a test page. When I logged off of chat, however, I tried to print a Word file, and nothing happened beyond the printer’s power light idly blinking. I went back into the help chat and we tried a bunch of other things, to no avail.

I’m going back to the help chat today…I guess they’re going to escalate this to the next level of support. But I’m wondering if anyone else out there has encountered this, and if so, what you did that fixed the problem? I’ve never had this kind of trouble with an installation before.

Redwolf

2

have you googled the file, bufferchm, and plowed through the numerous entries?

3

Site claims to fix 1714 errors.

Dunno nuffink about it, tho…

4

I figured I’d give this a try. It’s running right now.

Part of the problem is that the file that’s causing the error changes. When I first encountered this, it was “Webreg.” Now that we’ve cleaned up the registry, it’s hanging on this other one. So hopefully something that’s designed to find all the problems and fix them will do the trick.

Thanks…I’ll let you know how it goes!

Redwolf

5

Well, I don’t know what I did right, but the printer’s working now. Thanks, all!

Redwolf

6

Sounds like the Install clean-up was failing, but the driver installation worked fine.

7

I have often found with HP printers that the initial installation is a bugger, but they work just fine after that. So here’s hoping that’ll be the case for you.

8

The irony is, the install cleanup hosed my speakers. As far as my computer is concerned, they no longer exist. And I can’t find my recovery disks (granted my computer is six years old…). My headphones still work, however (and they’re really nice headphones), and I can listen to TG4 and YouTube, so I’m happy enough. And my new printer is working, so all is rosy.

Redwolf