Printer problems

[feygan]

I recently bought a new all in one printer ( cannon PIXMA MP170) It was all working fine until this morening when it wont print anything from the pc. It works as a scanner fine, the copy function works etc so I know its an issue with my pc.

When I try to print sumin I get an error "1772 the RPC server is unavalabe", I looked in my printers folder from control panel and it doesn't show up, when trying to add a printer it says "printer spool service not running". SO I tried going into management to manually start the spool service, all seemed fine but when I try to add again it shuts the operation down with the wonder microsoft error crash box???

So anyone know what I can do to repair the likely cause etc? I'm on xp home with sp2.

[lynx]

An awful lot of services rely on the RPC mechanism, if that service isn't working properly your problems are just going to get worse.

In particular, anti-virus services usually need that service to warn you about virus detection, so it is a prime target for virus writers. If you've been infected by such a virus your scanner may have detected it but be unable to warn you about it.

Check out your system with one of the online virus scanners - they work in the foreground so they don't need the RPC service.

[feygan]

Think I found the problem, seems to have been sorted by using an online scan. Many thanks.