SOLVED Epson/HP Wprinter drivers won't install

[Dave Telling]

I have a Gateway system that I recently upgraded from W7 to W10. Most things work OK, but I cannot print. Initially, Word said that I had no default printer chosen. I selected my Epson 633 as the default printer, tried again, no luck. I then thought I should remove & reinstall the printer after updating the drivers, so I downloaded the latest driver/utility package from Epson, and started installing it. When it gets to the part where it is going to install the EpsonNet utility (which is what "looks" for the printer on my wireless network & set s up the connection) it always crashes and I get an error message, "EpsonNet has stopped working". I have tried running as administrator, running compatibility check, turning off firewall and virus protection - same thing, no matter what.
My HP 1002W printer has a similar issue. I got the latest drivers, ran the install program, and as soon as it got to the point where it had detected the printer on my network, it crashed. It seems that there is something obviously wrong in my W10 install, but I have no idea what, and I have no idea where to look. Just for grins, I checked for an updated driver for my Ethernet card (which is connected to my wireless router) and got a "you have the latest drivers" message.

 

[Saltgrass]

I checked the drivers for the 633 printer and most were from 2012 with only the Scanner driver being from 2016. So maybe those drivers or some of those drivers will work and maybe they won't. If you have tried installing them in compatibility mode not sure what else you could do.

Do you need the EpsonNet software to create the wireless connection with the printer? Do the printer work normally on your system if you use a USB connection? Win 10 has changed some of the Networking process and certain devices have problems connecting or can't be found for some reason. I suppose a place to start is can you see the printer in the Settings Devices section or can you set up an IP address for it?

 

[Trouble]

Most printers that are network compatible support printing a configuration page from the physical printer console or in some cases more specifically a network configuration page that should reveal the IP address the printer is receiving from your router.
Will either of your two wireless printers produce such a page?
That information will allow you to ping the device to confirm network connectivity as well as perhaps allow you to enter the IP address of the printer into the URL address bar of your browser where you can further confirm connectivity and perhaps assign static IP addresses to the printers to facilitate using a standard TCP/IP port to communicate with the printer and send print jobs without using the proprietary printer networking software.

 

[Dave Telling]

@Saltgrass - Interesting. The scanner driver did, in fact, appear to install correctly. The EpsonNet always crashed at the printer discovery phase.
HOWEVER - this morning, all is working! I ended up doing a few things, one of which was removing some old junk from my Recovery (D drive - it has only a couple of megabytes of space left. The reason I was poking around there was that, since nothing else seemed to be working, I thought I'd try a Windows 10 update. I was surprised to find that my system, despite automatic updates being enabled, had not updated W10. When I told it to update, the update failed almost immediately, saying that I didn't have enough disk space. Since I had about 200GB of free space on my C: drive, I started checking & found that my D: drive was almost full, and quite a bit of that was stuff from literally years ago (the computer is about 9 years old). I removed enough junk to give me about 3.5GB of space, and ran update again, and this time it went through OK. This morning, I logged in, and despite haveing donr NOTHING to try and install printers, all my printers were listed, and none showed any errors or driver issues. I made a small Word doc, told it to print, and everything worked. How about that?