I’m failing at blogging big time at the moment. I’ve had several ideas for posts recently but I seem to start them and can’t finish them.
Anyway, this one seemed to write itself so hopefully it’ll be a bit of a kick start!
I took a call earlier in the week as someone wanted to print on both sides of the page while using Word 2010.
This is what she was expecting to see in the print options.
As you can see there are options to flip on either the long edge or the short edge.
This is what she was seeing instead.
My first thought was that the duplex option hadn’t been enabled on the printer driver but this wasn’t the case. Clicking through to the printer properties allowed the user to choose double sided printing which came out as expected.
I’d like to say I could take the credit for figuring this out but a search helped me out.
I found this thread on a Microsoft support forum which detailed the same problem.
It suggested the cause was down to a missing DLL
c:\windows\system32\prntvpt.dll
It was indeed not the system.
I upgraded the .NET framework on the PC to version 4 but this still didn’t solve the problem
The thread suggested two other options,
1) Uninstall .Net Framework and reinstall.
2) Copy the dll from another PC.
I went for option 2.
I found a PC that was on the same .NET version, copied the DLL and ran the following from a command prompt
REGSVR32 c:\windows\system32\prntvpt.dll
I reopened Word 2010 and the double sided options reappeared.
This was a Windows XP system but I’m pretty sure the same thing would apply for Vista/Windows 7.
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Interestingly, I checked my machine (recently upgraded to 2010 – we’ll be deploying it to the whole network in a few weeks) to see if it affected me, and the option wasn’t there to print on both sides.
Then, a few minutes later when I was showing a colleague it wasn’t there, it had magically appeared. Hmm!
Now that is weird! I don’t have an answer for that!
Andy,
Thanks for this tip I had the same problem the other day and you tip saved me loads of time sorting it out .
Chris
Thanks Chris
Glad it helped!
Perfect. This solved my problem. That file wasn’t even on the problem machine. Thanks.
Thanks a lot. I’ve just downloaded file prntvpt.dll from http://www.search-dll.com/dll-files/download/prntvpt.dll.html
and put in windows/system32 folder. reopen word and it works 🙂 great.
Thanks Giorgi 🙂
Hi,
Thanks for the above solution.
I had copy the printvpt.dll from another computer and follow the steps above with restarted the computer, and It’s worked.
Once against, thank you very much.
Regards,
Henry Ng
Hi Henry
Glad to be of help!
Dear Andy,
I had same issue with couple of XP based workstations.
After downloading prntvpt.dll and registering it, solved the problem.
Great help!!
Cheers
PrazAU
Thanks for this information. It took care of the problem on three XP machines here.
I’m always amazed at how people like you dig these thing up. You’re great.
Thanks for this, huge help, FWIW sfc /scannow fixed this for me in Windows 7 x64. Checked the log and confirmed that it was indeed this that it repaired.
Glad it worked!
Thank you for this.
Resolved my issue 🙂
Hi,
Had exactly the same problem with a Windows 8.1 system, but fiddling with the prntvpt.dll file didn’t fix anything. The 8.1 system was working fine until last week. The printer is an HP LaserJet 4Plus. My fix was to load the Postscript driver for the printer. Selecting that driver gave access to the duplexer. I have another Windows 8.1 system that does duplex fine for the regular PCL HP LaserJet 4Plus driver. The drivers are the same versions on both 8.1 systems.
Because this is an old printer the driver comes from Microsoft’s online archive, there is no “newer” driver. Maybe uninstalling the regular 4Plus driver and reinstalling it might fix the problem, but I didn’t try that.