Apollo XIII,
Thank you for the suggestions, they are greatly appreciated. I may try to update the network queues to UPD PCL 6 soon, but I want to test the PCL 6 driver first to make sure it does not alter the output (margins and such) of our documents, the majority of which were created with PCL 5 drivers and date back to Word 2000 and 2003 (We are using Word 2010 currently).
Also, I believe you are correct in yor assumption that using the non-version-specific version of the driver (HP Uniersal Printing PCL 5) created a situation where the driver was pushed down to the local clients. This seems to be exactly what happend, as all the local clients that had been using an HP Universal Printing PCL 5 driver for their local systems (as opposed to a device-specific driver form the Windows driver store in Windows 7) were the machines that had the issues. My questions would be:
1) How are we, as adminstrators, supposed to know to use version-specific drivers when updating the network queues? This whole mess came about because I was trying to solve a problem with output on the network printers when using the HP UPD PCL5. I knew the first thing HP Support would suggest was "update the drivers to the latest ones", so that's what I did, and disaster struck. I downloaded those drivers direct form HP, and at no point was I warned not to use the non-version-specific dirvers. Knowing this in advance would have saved me 3 work days of grief.
2) So if the driver was indeed pushed to the clients as it seems to have been, why would it then cause all the clients to process print jobs so slowly? What is wrong with the HP UPD PCL5 that it can't process local print jobs without long delays? Even when I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the UPD PCL5 on the local machine, it still wouldn't process jobs normally. Does this mean that I should not be using the UPD for locally connected machines? Sure seems like it.
In the end I solved the issue myself temporarily (I am going to rebuild the network print queues as you outlined above afte rtesting the PCL 6 driver). The way I solved this was:
1) Removed all printer devices from local machine that utilized the UPD.
2) Used Regedit to remove all keys related to the UPD from HKLM-System-ControlSet001-Control-Print-Environments-Windowsx64-Drivers (delete anything that referenes the UPD) and Version-3 (again delete all references to the UPD). Do the same thing for ControlSet002.
3) Once the registry was cleaned of UPD entries, I ran Install.exe from the UPD x64 package. I choose USB install and checked "Remove all versions of HP UPD from Windows driver store" and unchecked "Add HP UPD to Windows driver store". This removes the UPD PCL5 from the Windows 7 driver store.
4) Disconnect local printer and Reboot PC
5) Updated my local Windows driver store by kicking off a printer install on LPT1 and clicking the Windows Update button at the driver selection screen. This updates/adds all available printer drivers to the Windows 7 driver store. Cancelled the install after the store was updated.
6) Reconnected the local printer, at which point Windows installs it with the driver from the local printer driver store instead ot the HP UPD.
With the HP UPD no longer on the local system, the local printers behave normally. I then can add the network printers back to the Devices and Printers folder, and they behave normally as well.