Bonjour Error when Connecting to a Mac Printer via XP

I reimaged my PC recently, and I have gradually been reinstalling everything I need. Before the reimaging, I had used Apple’s Bonjour for Windows to quickly and easily connect wirelessly to the Brother printer connected to my brother’s Mac.

However, today I spent hours trying to get the printer connected and then surfing for troubleshooting information. The error message Bonjour displayed was, “You do not have sufficient access to your computer to connect to the selected printer.” This error message is apparently normally caused by the PC local security policy for “Devices: Prevent users from installing printer drivers.” My policy was set correctly set to “Disabled,” though.

My brother couldn’t find anything to try changing on his Mac, and it didn’t make sense that the problem was there since we had this working before I reimaged my PC.

However, we decided to try something I found on the web anyway, and it worked. My brother said that step 6 was the key: ‘6) Mac: Set firewall to "Set access for specific services and applications."’

Automatically end processes when shutting down

My PC was running really slow this morning, so I decided to restart it. Shutting down took forever because I was prompted to end each task one by one. Before I reimaged the hard disk on my PC, I had edited the registry to automatically end tasks at shutdown. Today it took me so long to find what to edit again that I decided this needed to be in my PC notes.

You should know what you’re doing before you edit the registry, since you can really mess things up if you make a mistake. I backed up my registry and then changed HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\AutoEndTasks to 1.

Below are some related Microsoft links.

• Safekeeping the Windows XP Registry
• How To Automatically close non-responsive programs