Parallels 4.0 printing problems

For those of you thinking of upgrading to Parallels 4.0, you might want to wait a bit yet. At least, if you are, like me, hoping that Parallels 4.0 solves its long-standing printing problems. Unfortunately, it appears to be worse than in 3.0, although the problem may not be entirely the fault of Parallels.

The “old problem” that Parallels printing fails to properly identify printers is still present. That is, in attempting to set up a printer port for my laserjet, Parallels will only print to the correct printer intermittently. It is possible to make Parallels print to the correct printer, but only if you delete every other printer profile from the Mac. This becomes tedious, as I use four different printers — so, when I absolutely must print from Windows, I have to delete all of my Mac printer profiles except for the one I want to print to, print from Windows, and then put my printers back. Hideous. This has been a problem from Parallels 2.0 and I had hoped they’d fix it in 4.0 but, no luck.

Now, the bad news is that in 3.0 you could work around this problem using Bonjour. Unfortunately, Bonjour no longer seems to work in Parallels 4.0 with Windows XP SP3. I have heard some reports that Bonjour is broken in XP SP3, although this is unconfirmed — there is an Apple forum thread on it. Either way, I can’t get Bonjour to work — and, I have downloaded the latest Bonjour, installed it and set up printers. It appears to print, but nothing arrives at the printer… is Parallels somehow blocking the printer communication? Is Bonjour broken? I don’t know, but for now… no printing in Parallels 4.0.