Parallel port service cannot start

June 17, 2008

I recently built a new computer for a customer using the Asus P5E-WS

Professional Motherboard. As is the case nowadays the board had no parallel

port. The customer uses a piece of DOS based engineering software that has a

parallel port (LPT1) authentication dongle. I installed a PCI-e adaptor and

all appeared to go well however the software wouldn’t read the dongle. The

device manager shows the card installed and working but when I went to the

show hidden devices in the device manager it shows the parallel port driver

cannot start. The event viewer shows The service cannot be started, either

because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with

it." I cannot manually start it either.

I uninstalled and reinstalled the card as well as the driver with no

success. The OS is Windows XP with service pack 3 and all the updates.

I don’t believe this is a hardware issue but has anyone ever seen an issue

like this? I think it has to do with the fact that there was no parallel

port when Windows was originally loaded but I don't know how to work around

it.

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