HP Officejet 5610: desktop control centre faulty

I have been running an HP Officejet 5610 All-in-one without problems for four-five years. This week, from one day to the next with no apparent cause, the desktop control centre (called, in my Italian version, "Centro Soluzioni" - sorry, don't know what it's called in English) quit on me: it's the dashboard which lets you scan, fax, print, set settings, etc. The graphics open up OK, but there is no text in any of the labels. Some of the top-level commands I can operate by blind guesswork and memory, but the sub-commands have no text either. There's a picture here: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/53412385: you can see all the buttons with no explanatory text on them. Also the icon down in the taskbar has only a little favicon in it, but no text.

It is out of guarantee, so HP will not accept a service request from me. I have disinstalled all the software and reinstalled it from the original CD. I have made sure XP is updated. I have checked for any updates on the HP site and loaded two of them.

The main problem is that, having disinstalled and reinstalled all the software, I now can't reset all my settings, like fax number, sender, preferred resolutions, etc., etc.

If anybody has any suggestion on how to fix this, I'd be most grateful.

 

It looks like it runs on Adobe Flashplayer:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...lc=en&product=441125&tmp_track_link=ot_search

This is your printers webpage where I traced it:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=441125=en
There should be a corresponding page on the Italian website.

There are three methods of uninstalling the software, from the Start -> All Programs menu, from Add or Remove Programs or by running the installation CD. Try running the installation CD and choose the uninstaller there.
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...&product=441125&tmp_track_link=ot_search#N183

Let us know how those go. It might require removing HP listings in the registry.

Matt

 

Hi Matt and thanks for input. By coincidence - totally unrelated - I had updated Flash Player only 10 days or so ago, but I checked again. There was a very tiny update available which I installed. There was no "uninstall" option on the original CD, so
I completely disinstalled the HP software yet again using Revo Uninstaller (which scared the heck out of me by listing over 7,000 "related registry entries" to delete) and reinstalled the HP software yet again from the CD.

Problem remains. GRAR.

However, looking at the links you kindly provided, I spotted an HP users' forum which I hadn't been able to find before, so I'm going to take it there. But not today, because this idiocy has already cost me about a full day at a time when I'm trying to meet deadlines, and at least I can do simple, straightforward printing, so I'll abandon this thread for the moment. If I get any help from the users' forum I'll come back and post it here for anyopne else experiencing the same problem.

 

PS - apologies: there is an uninstall option on the CD. Not sure how I came to overlook it.

 

Try that uninstaller. You may need to disable your Antivirus when uninstalling/installing.

Note that they also suggest trying the drivers to download from the website.

Something I meant to ask, does your computer meet all the system requirements? Do you have plenty of disk space? The last time I installed a HP (all-in-one, I think), it took over one GB of disk space.

Good idea to start checking at their forums.

Matt

 

1. Yep - plenty of disk space.

2. When you launch the installation program from the CD, the first thing it does is to check with the HP site if there are any updates. It didn't find any, and proceeded with the installation. I did a manual check later, and downloaded two (in fact, I downloaded them all, but the other three tried to install and then quit with the message "not relevant to this installation" or similar).

3. My antivirus is avast! and it didn't object to anything.

4. Before I go through another thumb-twiddling waste of half a day to uninstall and reinstall, especially since I've already done it twice , I'd like to wait and see if there's any good advice on the HP users' forum - I see HP techs often chime in with advice.

5. Just noticed another strange thing: although the Solutions Center is faulty as described, the Image Zone and Image Zone Express dashboards are fine. I hadn't noticed this before, because I never use them anyway and had deleted the icons to keep the desktop clean. I installed them this time (using "Total full install with salad, fries and bread" on the CD) because I didn't want to miss any essential parts.

As I said, I'll revert here if anything helpful comes from the HP forum. Meanwhile thanks for your patience and help.