I am running Windows Millennium Edition with Internet Explorer 5.5 and

I am running Windows Millennium Edition with Internet Explorer 5.5 and for some reason I can't print from any web pages. I have re-installed my printer and it works fine on other applications. I even took the printer to another computer running Windows ME and it works fine. Is there a setting on my computer that I seem to be missing?
- Dave

This question was answered on September 30, 2002. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Before I give you a couple of possible fixes to your printing problem, let me first give you an ‘atta boy’ for the things that you did properly before asking your question

By testing the printing ability within other applications, you immediately eliminated the physical printer as the problem This one quick check eliminates some of the guesswork and saves valuable time (and frustration) for both you and those that attempt to help you.

The next step that was very helpful was testing your printer with another machine that was running the same version of Windows and Internet Explorer This quickly eliminates a compatibility problem between your printer and the software version in question.

This quickly narrows the problem down to your Internet Explorer program Certain versions of both Internet Explorer and Outlook Express can exhibit a symptom whereby you get blank pages with header and footer information when you attempt to print a web page or e-mail message.

The problem is generally in the ‘encoding language’ setting that helps the program to display the content based on the language that was used to create it If this setting gets switched to an obscure language or it ‘guesses’ wrong, you may get a blank page when you attempt to print.

The default setting in Internet Explorer is to ‘Auto-Select’ the proper language for decoding a page, which can cause the problem To disable the ‘Auto-Select’ setting, click on the ‘View’ menu then click on the ‘Auto-Select’ option to remove the checkmark in front of it (If there is no checkmark, it is disabled already.)

If that does not work, try manually selecting the ‘Unicode’ encoding option (you may have to click on the ‘More’ menu to see all of the available languages).

Outlook Express may not have an ‘Auto-Select’ option, so manually selecting Unicode should solve the problem.

Be sure to close the program after making the change to ensure that the change takes place.

If this problem just suddenly happened, it may have been the result of going to a web site that required a new language to be downloaded and installed By default, Internet Explorer will attempt to download a new language module when it detects the need (usually asking your permission first) If something goes wrong during this process or it does not complete the transaction, the result could be the blank print pages.

Another common web printing problem is on sites that use ‘frames’ to display their content Anytime you scroll down a web page and a portion of the site does not move, it is likely that frames are in use.

When you tell Internet Explorer to print a site that uses frames, it will generally print each frame on separate pages.

You can print the entire page together by clicking on File, Print then clicking on the ‘Options’ tab at the top and selecting ‘As laid out on screen’.