W98 SE I went to bed leaving a four-page job printing. This morning only the first page had printed. Now every print job I load results in an error message to the effect that Spool32 has attempted an illegal operation and will be closed down. That includes the printer utility to clean print heads. The one exception is an MSDOS command [copy con prn ^M ^L^Z ^M] which is quietly ignored, presumably because it’s outside Windows and so it can’t call a Windows error message.
In my attempts at troubleshooting I have checked the cable ends are firmly engaged, re-installed the printer (Epson Stylus Color 460) after it ran its performance check OK when isolated from the computer. I have Extracted spool32 from the CD-Rom file WIN98 WIN98-46.CAB to the right place in the WindowsSystem directory, overwriting the troublesome one in case of corruption on the hard disk . All with the same results as before.