Security - We will get there

I bought this multi funcation printer for my home office recently and installed into first workstation without any problem. Since it's a network printer, I tried to install the driver for the rest of my computers in this long weekend. Here is what I did to get it working eventually.

First I noticed there are both Universal Print Driver and the "Windows Full Solutions Software" from the HP download page.

Since I just need to install the printer driver, I tried to use the Universal Print Driver but no success. It searched the network and found the printer in the list but just could not proceed to the next step.

Then I downloaded the full solution software which is 300M big, install went well until it tried to connect the device. I chose network connection instead of USB connection and moved into a screen kept telling me Printer Not Found, no matter I tried to let the software search the network or just manually put in the printer's ip address/host name etc. I tried to do that from two computers, one is Windows XP and the other is Windows Vista. They all had firewall disabled, they all are in the same subnet with the printer and they all can ping/browse the printer. Both of them failed to detect the printer, therefore the installed can not proceed further and no printer installed.

As the last method for me, I tried to connect with USB connection. This time the Full Solutions Software installation went OK and I have the printer installed. I then added a new port from the printer property page. I am using the printer's name, raw protocol at port 9100 which are copied from the one with success installation. Finally I did a test page and the printing worked through network.

Although I get the printer setup in my workstations but it's just such a pain. I had to move my workstations to the printer so I can connect them with USB to finish the driver installation first. I definitely believe there are better ways to install the network printer from HP but I just could not figure out what's the proper way to do it. Searching from Internet did reveal quite a few complains for this type of "Printer Not Found" issue but there is no answer yet. Hope it's just an obviously error and someone with the experience can point us to the right direction soon.