Printer problems

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.

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.

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