My company uses the M525 to print medical claims into preprinted forms (UB04 forms). We have almost 80 of these printers distributed to 40 facilities. Each facility has at least one and several have multiple. All of our facilities share a network using vpn tunneling, though each facility is on its own subnet (one facility will have xxx.xxx.0.xxx and the next will have xxx.xxx.1.xxx for their IPs) so we're able to connect computers to printers in other facilities by simply connecting via the IP address.
All of our facilites are able to print these forms correctly except for three. All three are located in the same state and they're the only ones in that state. Of those three, one is using a newer system for generating the claims within Internet Explorer 9, while the other two are using our older system that uses proprietary software. We have about a dozen facilties with the new system while the rest are on the old system, yet they can all print fine except for these three.
All of the problem facilities have similar symptoms: forms will simply be printed so that the print doesn't line up correctly with the boxes on the form. Printing will be fine for the first page or two but will start to crawl up or down the page on subsequent prints until they're off by as much as a full line before resetting and beginning the process over. In the newer system, IE's margins are set to 0.17" on all sides, while the older has a different method for setting margins. The same settings yield perfect results in all facilities except these three. It's worth mentioning that the documents are prepared as a single spool without page breaks.
The facilities with the older system use a remote desktop connected to a data center we contract with. Theoretically their settings should be identical and the computer hardware should have no impact. Unfortunately, as we don't administer the servers ourselves, it makes it difficult to try out different settings. The newer system is all local: the facility will have its own print server on site and the computers run IE on their own hardware rather than through remote desktop. Because of this, most of my troubleshooting has been focuses on the facility with the newer system.
The given facility has 5 employees, each with their own computer, who print the forms on the printer in question. All of them use Win7, four with HP 8300 desktops and one with an HP 4530 laptop. It's also worth mentioning that the computers are assigned to a domain which pushes out group policies (theoretically these policies should be identical across our facilities, but I'm not the system admin so I don't know exactly what goes on there).
I've tried having the employees print to three m525 printers within the facility with identical results. Next, I connected them to a printer we had here at our corporate office and they were able to print the forms perfectly, so we shipped that printer to them. Once it was hooked up, they did a test and found the same problem they'd had with their own printers. Suspecting that it might have something to do with the quality of the paper, we shipped them some of the forms from our facility and they printed with the same problem.
I've tried letting the print server push the driver to their machines and I've tried installing the driver and configuring the printer on their computers manually with no impact on performance (the print server doesn't assign our corporate printer, so I only tested that with the manual install). I've also tried changing the IP address of the printer to one that wasn't in their server and manually configuring it to verify that a lingering setting from the print server wasn't interfering.
I'm at a complete loss. This problem has been going on for 8 months (ever since we installed the first m525 in their facility) and we're no closer to solving it than we were 8 months ago. What could cause five users to be unable to print correctly to three printers in their own facility (on their subnet) but allow them to print correctly to a printer in another facility on another subnet?
UPDATE: Just did a couple more tests with one of the users. Tried installing the PostScript driver instead of PCL, and it actually made things worse. Then I connected her to her old printer (the one that they used to print to) which they had shipped back to us and it prints perfectly. Somehow it's something on the network there, either hardware or software, but I have no idea what sort of network issue could possibly account for a slight margin shift.