Issue

A Windows print server has multiple HPBPRO processes running simultaneously or the HPBPRO process contributes to crashing or hanging a print server.

Some examples of what the enterprise customer may see are as follows:

• CPU utilization on Print Server will go to 100% or everything looks fine but blank pages are printing out on printers. During this time if the administrator goes to Task Manager they may see there are multiple instances of HPBPRO running on the server as a process.
• A customer has multiple print servers running in their network environment. Various servers are seeing HPBPRO randomly become active for no apparent reason and causing performance problems on the server. Closing or killing the HPBPRO processes or rebooting the server solves the issue for the time being.

Detailed Information

This problem occurs when following conditions are met:

• The HP Toolbox is installed through a HP Printer CD on client machine.
• The Print Server has one or more EAC based Printers shared to clients.
• Client machine has one to more printer connections (Point and Print) through the Print Server.

When Toolbox is installed and running on a client machine it starts a local HPBPRO process to resolve ports for each of the printers in the Printers folder (including remote printer connections) every 30 seconds. This local instance of HPBPRO will also start an instance of the HPBPRO process on the Print Server through the Point and Print connection. With a slow or busy network the local HPBPRO could leave stale instance of the process on a server. This stale instance will remain an active process until the process is stopped or the system is restarted.

A common scenario is the following: A Print Server is vending a large amount of shared printers (100+) to a large amount of clients (500+). A small number of clients have Toolbox installed and statusclient.exe or hpstatus.exe will trigger multiple (possibly 20+) instances of "HPBPRO" processes on the server. Over period of time these stale instances on the Print Server cause the system to hang or crash.

Solution and Workaround

Update the printer driver to the latest available version.

Click here to download the most current driver version for your printer at welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html.