Unable to open any Printer's properties

Hi everyone,

I'm stuck with a very bad issue.
I have a Windows XP up to date (SP and hotfix)
When i want to print something, it works but i can't display the properties of any printers (hence i'm not able to change any setup for them)
It's not working from a program or from the Control Panel itself

I tried to uninstall printers and reinstall thems without success

All the printers are local printers, some are even "virtual" printer (like PDFCreator)

I've disable System Restore since a very long time, so no chance to rollback at any starting point

Is there anything (beside reinstallation of XP itself) to do to reset the Spool or Printing layer of Windows XP ?

Any idea ?

If you're planning on reinstalling, why not use the repair option of the installation CD?

Well, i'm not planning to reinstall my windows at all
I don't want to loose all that is installed

i'm trying to find a workaround to that issue

are you logged in as administrator, or do you have administrative rights?

Edit: Just re-read your post, and saw that you uninstalled and reinstalled.....which means you have administrative rights...... ummm, doesn't the repair option from the windows xp setupcd keep the os intact? You go to the part where you choose the partition (Do not delete it) and then it should give you a repair option from there. Been about 3 years since I've done that, but if memory serves correct, it just copies the core system files back to the drive.

When I get home, I will check it out.....

Is the printer spooler running? There are some conditions where bad or incorrect printer driver entries can cause the spooler to crash, and iirc you can't open any printer properties then.

About the spooler service, as i wrote above, i can print for sure so, yes, service is running

about trying to run a new install and choose repair, i'm very frightened about that...

Well, one thing you can try first is the system file checker. Click Start, Run, and then type CMD and hit enter.

At the command prompt, you will type sfc /scannow
This will scan all of your system files to make sure they aren't corrupt.

As far as the repair install, I just tried it out on my laptop here, and it has no ill effects as long as you do it properly. Here are the steps:

1. Boot to the Windows XP setup CD
2. On the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press [Enter] to setup XP
3. When the license agreement screen comes up, press [F8]
4. It will then locate your XP install....here you will press [R] for repair.
5. It will go through the setup process (it will delete the core system files, reinstall them, it will import your registry hive, and reinstall Windows components) and then it will ask you for you product key (Make sure this is the same one that originally was installed when this O/S was put on your computer)

If you do not know your product key for XP, there are a million places to go to get product key retrieval from the registry for you. Make sure you have the product key before you start the repair install.

Like I said, I just now did it (takes about 30 minutes or so) and all of my files and programs are still intact. All of my settings remained the same as well (network, personal, etc. etc.)