210940 - Won't printe: Crashes Spool32.exe, must restart Windows; also Print Preview heading text overwritten

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Printing: Output, defect)

Description

[Raymond A. Chamberlin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

I guess this is another page not written to some purist standard, but Netscape
4.79 handles it fine.  However, IE 6.0 won't print it either, although it does
display the Print Preview correctly.

If you try to print this page (either from the printer icon or from the 'File'
menu) clicking OK on the printer setup window in the process, in my case the
printer being the HP 932C (most recent driver) -- thereafter, Moz's
horizontal-bar progress indicator goes only to 30% (in one case 40%) and stops.
A CTL-ALT-DEL shows the spool32.exe file as not responding and Windows must be
restarted in order to get my computer unfrozen.  (The printing problem occurs
whether I set my printer to do single-sided printing or double.)

If you look at a preview of your print instead of trying to print it, you see
the FindLaw heading, on the page to be printed, as having its text containing
overwritten characters.  The body text is OK.

While it's true that IE can't print this page either, still Netscape 4.79 prints
it normally; and I thought Moz was supposed to do essentially everything
Netscape could do and more.  A Web browser, that coughs or totally chokes on so
many Web pages that Netscape 4.79 can handle properly, is just no damn good as a
general-purpose browser; it is only a curiosity of some self-styled standards
purists.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Display the Web page of the above URL.
2. Try either to preview a print of it or to actually print it.
3. See overwritten text in the heading of this page in its print preview -- or,
whether or not previewed beforehand, or whether attempting printing from either
the printer icon or the 'Print' item in the 'File' menue, observe that Moz'
progress indicator stops spooling at 30% and freezes, requiring Windows to be
restarted in order to run anything.

Actual Results:  
See "Details".

Expected Results:  
Either properly displayed a preview of the page to be printer, in the case of
viewing such preview, or finished spooling the page to my printer and then
properly printing it.

No crash display.

Comment 1

[James Napolitano]

Win98se, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:) Gecko/20040309

My Epson printer is currently possessed by the devil, so I can't actually print
anything out.  I was able to do a 'print to file' of this page in both Mozilla
and IE without a problem.  The progress bar made it to 100%.  The file that was
generated was 14-17mb, which makes me think that maybe it is this large size
that is giving your system problems.  Try doing a print to file of this page (in
the Print dialog box, there's a checkbox for this), or try printing out
comparably large webpages.
I was able to see the overlapping in the title during print preview, but I think
that is an unrelated issue.
BTW, please only include information in your bug reports directly related to
reproducing or solving the bug in question; there are plenty of newsgroups for
ranting ;)

Comment 2

[James Napolitano]

No reply. marking WFM just like all the other crashes that only occur with your
system. Reopen if you have new info to add.