My shared printer has been incredibly slow since I installed XP SP2 and Windows Firewall. Viewing the printer properties dialog from a client machine takes almost a minute, and the spooling is painfully slow.
My configuration:
-- 3 XP SP2 computers behind a SOHO firewall router
-- IP addresses via DHCP
-- Windows Firewall set to enable file and print sharing on all 3 computers
-- One of the PCs has a local printer that it shares out to my local network.
Printing from the PC with the local printer is fast. Printing from a client PC is agony.
Today, I tried disabling Windows Firewall on the PC with the printer. This instantly fixed the printing problem -- the client PCs were almost as fast as the PC with the local printer.
I enabled Windows Firewall again, went to the Advanced tab and turned on logging of dropped packets. When I tried printing from a client PC, I found that numerous TCP 135 packets were being received from the client PC and dropped. So, on the PC with the local printer, I used Windows Firewall to add an exception for TCP port 135, subnet only. Printing from the client PCs was fast again.
Can someone explain why I need this port open to share a printer? I believe that TCP 135 is the RPC Port Mapper, and is typically closed.