Windows 10 has got into a mess again thanks to a patch which fixes some problems but accidentally breaks other stuff, and in this case, it’s printer users who are feeling the pain.
You’ll likely recall that recently, Microsoft cured a serious problem whereby BSoD crashes were affecting users of certain printers, delivering an optional out-of-band update (KB5001567) as a fix.
However, that patch – which addressed said crashing gremlin introduced by Microsoft’s cumulative updates for March – has seemingly caused some folks fresh problems with their printers.
Windows Latest reports that one affected user said: “We had no BSOD issues, but when printing photos only part of these appear on paper, also, invoices are printed, but without graphics. We also have the problem with all Dymo printers, which print blank labels. This KB5001567 patch does not solve these two (for us major) printing problems (running Windows 10 20.04, printing to PDF, HP and Dymo).”
Microsoft has acknowledged these new troubles in the support document for the KB5001567 update, noting that further printer problems have been introduced after the March 15 update (which is KB5001567, for Windows 10 October 2020 Update, or the equivalent updates for older versions of Windows 10), or the previous March cumulative updates (released on March 9 – which caused the original BSoD issues).
Mystery of the missing pages
Those new issues include parts of a printed document being missing, or coming out as solid black boxes rather than what they should be, or various formatting fails including the lines of tables not being printed. Some documents (or labels) might not print at all, and users get blank pages here and there, with this seemingly happening randomly according to reports we’ve seen online.
Obviously enough, this is not a good state of affairs, but equally, it’s not the first time that a Microsoft patch has caused collateral damage elsewhere.
Microsoft says it’s now working on a solve for these new issues and expects to deploy a fix in the “coming days”, which makes it sound like we shouldn’t be waiting too long. And hopefully this cure won’t throw any further spanners in the works.
- These are the best laptops of 2021
