[stenz77]

My father in law's Mac is an iMac on a dial-up connection. He is running OS X, but hasn't updated it in ages, so while I know it isn't Panther, I don't know exactly which version it is (I am not over at his house now, instead had briefly talked to him on the phone).

His issue is that he has an Epson printer (appears to be working fine), but after some fiddling on the computer by his little daughter (some sort of Harry Potter game) - the printer is now not working (software error).

When he goes into Print Center, he clicks on "add" to get the printer back into the system and then a window comes up essentially saying that "The application print center has quit"... the standard crash window.

What is the best way to resolve this? I am new to Macs and have fortunately not had any problems with mine for the most part, so I haven't had to deal with that. My resolution would have first been to run the software update just to see if there is a new print center out - but he is on a dial-up connection, so that is not going to happen.
He does have the repair disks - but I have no clue how to use those and fear wiping out his important data.

Any info would be great because it would then save me from having them e-mail me everything they want printed so that we can do it here and then they come over and get it from us.

Thanks

[tooki]

There's a little app out there called Print Center Repair. Find it and run it, it often fixes exactly that problem.

tooki

[bergy]

If that doesn't work ... try this ...

Trash Print Centre Prefs .. Move to trash and empty trash
Macintosh HD/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.print.PrintCentre.plist

[stenz77]

I had him try deleting the preferences - that in itself didn't work, but I told him to try rebooting and then seeing how it goes (I am assuming it will not work if it wasn't working prior).
He is going to call me back and if it still doesn't work I will tell him to download the Print Center Repair tool - hopefully it is a small file.

Thanks for the tips and hopefully the repair tool will fix it!

[stenz77]

Incidentally, for those that find this in the future, perhaps searching for a similar problem, and they want the link to the Print Center Repair tool - here you go: http://www.fixamac.net/software/pcr/