A customer reported they were receiving a maddening "CARDSTOCK LETTER" message on their HP LaserJet while printing payroll reports: they had never asked for cardstock, not used cardstock ever, but were forced to click the [OK] button to print on regular paper. On. Every. Printout. This gets tedious very quickly.
(front panel of my HP LaserJet 4200)
What's going on?
On everybody's desktop machine, Windows maintains individual print settings for each user: one person usually prints letterhead to printer #1, some other person prefers landscape on printer #2, etc. These settings are all on a per-printer basis in a kind of binary structure known as a DEVMODE.
Though the base structure of the DEVMODE is mostly consistent across printer types, there are almost always additional settings that printer manufacturers might include to support unique features of their device.
What I believe is going on is that changing the print driver on the central print server does not fully reset the local user's settings: "Hey, we changed the driver so your local settings are bogus so we're clearing them for you". Instead, these old settings are left behind to be misinterpreted, and for whatever reason, CARDSTOCK seems to be a common misinterpretation.
Thankfully, the fix is super easy.
On the user's desktop, go into the printer's settings, then click [Preferences]. The particulars vary depending on which print driver you use—I always recommend using the HP Universal PCL drivers, either version 5 or 6— but on my printer this can be found in the Printing Shortcuts tab where we see Cardstock as the Paper type.
(click for larger image)
Clicking [Reset] will clear all the per-user settings for that printer; this is preferable to just resetting the Paper type to "Unspecified" because it's possible (likely?) that others settings might be mis-set as well. But if you don't have this Printing Shortcuts tab, just poke around and reset things that don't look right.
This must be done on each desktop computer that talks to that printer: doing it just on the main printserver won't impact the per-user desktop settings.
And it's wise to close and re-open any applications that talk to the printer to be sure they receive the updated settings.
