Weird printer problem

My neighbor is having a weird problem with their printer that I've never seen before and I'm hoping someone here might have a suggestion how to fix it.

They have a Gateway PC running XP Home with SP2 and have a HP Deskjet 842c printer connected with a parallel cable. Printing works just fine from most apps in Windows, and the printer test page works just fine too. However, when they try to print web pages or email, it prints the html language along with the text from the page and absolutely no graphics will print. Neeless to say this makes for very unreadable print.

I've tried uninstalling the printer and reinstalling with the latest drivers from HP, no success. Since they use Netzero as their ISP (dialup), I opened an issue with them thinking it might be something in their app. They say it's not them. I've checked the IE settings and can't see anything there that might cause this to happen. I've run out of ideas at this point and would welcome any suggestions as to how to resolve this.

 

Thanks TonyT, I'll try to get by there this evening and check those out. I'll post back with what I find.

 

TonyT, I tried the things in your post, no luck. Print from web pages and email still has html language in it. I'm going to try to attach a jpg file example of what the print looks like to see if that helps.

I found this in a forum on another site after a Google search and I'm going to try this tonight if I can;

You need to set Internet Explorer as your default browser.

Go Start > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Set Program Access and Defaults and make sure IE7 is selected as your default browser.

Apparently it is caused by the AOL browser.


AOL was installed and they removed it before installing Netzero. IMHO, another reason not to like AOL.

 

It worked, I followed the instructions and set IE as the default browser and everything is fine now.