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I am currently experiencing a problem with several Kyocera fs1800 printers
where all it will print is strings of the character á. These are remote
printers emulating Epson LQ-850 printers on a SCO Openserver 5.0.4 machine
connected to the network via Netgear two port PS110 print servers.

Prints are initiated from an application created in the 4GL language Sculptor.
The application has several printer driver modules. The driver module used
with our Kyocera printers is for Epson LQ-850 printers. This driver takes the
data inserts the Epson control codes where appropriate to toggle settings such
as italics, bold and underline. At the head of the data is a string of
Proscribe 2e instructions.

!R! SEM 5;EXIT

This should cause the Kyocera printer to set emulation to Epson LQ-850. At the
foot of the data the printer is reset by the Proscribe 2e string.

!R! RES;EXIT

The data is finally sent to the printer using a pipe to lp. This has normally
worked fine.

Currently all I have managed to do is find a cause but this is not the only
cause and has brought me no closer to a solution. Our users connect to the SCO
machine via the Anita terminal emulator running on a mix of Windows 98, NT4 and
2000. On occasion a user will want to print what Anita is currently displaying
and use the Anita print screen. If that print goes to one of the problem
printers it is a certainty that any print sent after from the SCO machine will
be just pages of the á character. This will continue until the printer is
either power cycled or someone sends a print from the shell command line. A
menu option has been provided to the affected users that simply pipes a
directory listing to lp.

Knowing a sure-fire way of triggering the problem I have printed and captured
from spool a good print from the Sculptor application and a bad print. The
spool data is identical. All Proscribe and Epson control characters are
present and correct. Interestingly I sent the same report to print a third
time before clearing the printer of its problem. The print out of the bad
reports do not match each other but are both from the same report data as the
good report and the spool data all matches.

In summary, certain prints (unknown) from Windows, and one in particular (Anita
screen prints), causes all subsequent SCO prints wrapped in Proscribe 2e and
Epson LQ-850 control codes to print a garbled pattern of á characters until the
printer receives a clean unformatted print from sh or the printer is power
cycled.

1. What is causing this and why?
2. What can be done to stop it happening?
3. What have I overlooked?

Many thanks to anyone who offers ideas and solutions and any vital information
that I may have omitted can be posted upon request.

Alfie Ilkins