Comment 96 for bug 35638

Thanks, but I have the parallel port reserved and have used these printers several years on Windoze with this connection....need to use them via the usb cables and it allows easy unplug and attach to my laptop. Also problem is obviously not electrical since Windoze correctly senses and accesses the printers.

Also am beginning to think this problem is not a CUPs problem but a HAL problem.
When the printers are shown available, hal has correctly found both. When the HP4 is dropped (can happen to the 890c but infrequently) hal only shows the cable but not the attached usb device.

If hal finds the HP4 it is listed as an "unknown" device on usb 1, which still lets me configure it properly. On reboot, if hal finds the "unknown" printer (HP4) on another usb port, cups reroutes the pended print jobs to it (cups finds the printer "unknown" and uses the correct driver to print a pended document).

hal-device-manager displays the parallel to usb cable correctly and printer as "unknown usb" when it finds it.
When it does not find it, it displays the cable correctly but no "usb unknown".

Suspect this could be a timing problem within hal, occasionally not receiving a signal back from the 'unknown' printer a startup within the expected time during device identification. Timing differences withing the devices themselves could account for the differences in how frequently they are dropped.

Is there a way to slow the hal startup or cycle process, or re run hal after the system is stable to rebuild the tables ,or even force a device into hal's table? (are there any control parameters for hal that can be user set or forced?)