I have a number of older LP2844 printers. One is at a workstation where I print small price and barcode labels. The computer is running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and connected via USB. It has been very reliable.

Today I installed a free trial of BarTender 2021 R9 to see how it works. I successfully set up a label with some data fields from an Excel file and printed a short series of labels. I made some formatting changes and printed again. All seemed fine.

I then made some more formatting changes and printed the labels again. This time the printer light turned solid orange and the printer would not print. I cancelled the job, power cycled the printer, etc. When the printer powers on, it shows a green light for a fraction of a second, then the light goes solid orange.

Pressing on the cover does not change the status, so it is not the lid sensor. I can get the printer to auto-sense and dump, but as soon as I exit the dump, it immediately goes back to a solid orange light. Windows recognizes that the printer is connected when it is turned on. When I disconnect the USB cable and power cycle, auto-sense, and dump, the result is still the same, a solid orange light.

What happened to my printer and how do I fix it?