8500 freezes when printing ...

[Bryan Forbes]

Hoping someone will give me some ideas/insight or otherwise to get this 
going ...

I am troubleshooting an 8500/120 at the Grade School I work at for one 
of our 6th grade teachers.  I have already dumped the older OS and 
updated the unit to OS 7.6.1.  She hadn't been able to print or get on 
the net there in years, so I got her on the network and promised her 
(and another mac using teacher) that I'd get them printing as well.

Everything has gone well except for this one item.  On this unit 
(8500/120 running OS 7.6.1) I hooked up to a Asante Localtalk/Ethernet 
converter & Apple Laserwriter Select 360, I get a freeze as the print 
job is sent.  The printing connection is through a normal ethernet 
cable from the 8500 to the drop in the classroom and ethernet back out 
of the drop and to the Asante unit.

The print job pops up on the desktop printer and then the 8500 just 
locks up.  After you start the unit back up ( via a 3 fingered salute), 
the print job goes on through or it freezes again.  Finally, the print 
jobs will clear out and the machine will stop freezing.

I have a different ethernet drivers in the extensions folder ... do I 
only need the "built-in driver" and ditch the others.  Something 
obviously doesn't like each other when a print job is sent through 
(doesn't matter what the application is that's printing -- Clarisworks 
4 and Icab both freeze when requesting a print job).

I searched through MacFixit and couldn't find anything through a search 
for "printing + freezes".

Do I do the normal troubleshooting routing of starting with a barebones 
system and start adding back in extensions until I find the problem?  
Does anybody have any insight into what the possible culprit would be?  
I have ditched a lot of other non-essential extensions already in 
trying to pare the system down to essential extensions.

Thanks,

Bryan Forbes - Business Education
Blue Ridge School District #18
Bellflower/Farmer City/Mansfield, IL
Macintosh is to Windows as Dvorak is to Qwerty ...