It must be a software problem. The fact that it works perfectly when printing from Linux tells me the printer is 100% fine.
A little bit of system information:
CPU = Pentium III 449.010Mhz with 512KB cache
RAM = 384MB pc100
Printer = Epson Stylus C88
Connection = USB
OS = Ubuntu
Driver = CUPS+Gutenprint v5.0.0-rc2
This is my "Linux" machine of the moment. It was originally a Windows 98SE machine until I loaded Linux onto it to test out some funky printer problems. After some fooling around and reading some FAQs I installed Samba and CUPS and shared the printer on my network.
Oh yeah, for all those people who are wondering why you are being asked for a login and password when you try to share stuff?
sudo smbpasswd -a [your login]
That will create a Samba login that you can use from your Windows machines to reach your shares on the Linux machine. It took me a while to find that one because all my searches were leading me to people asking the same thing!
At any rate, I laughed maniacally when my Windows XP machine connected to my Samba shares on my Linux machine and then installed the drivers for the shared printer. Then I printed a test page...
The same thing that was happening when it was hooked up directly to the Windows machines!
Has anyone else had this problem? Epson's website support is useless and when I contacted them they told me I was out of warranty...
I have come to believe two possible things are occurring here:
1)One of the many windows "updates" broke the driver.
2)Epson included some "planned obsolescence" in their driver.
The first option is not very likely as even the Windows 98 SE machine was printing all wrong and that machine didn't even go on the Internet! It was also waaaaaay out of date on it's updates.
The second option is more likely but is still hard to believe.
Just so you know, I did go back and install the drivers that came on the CD-ROM, same problem. I then downloaded the most recent drivers from Epson, same problem.