Printer Sharing between Win7 and XP with HP Deskjet 5650

I have run into an issue at work that I cannot seem to figure out. A user wants to share his desktop printer (HP Deskjet 5650) from his Windows 7 machine to his XP machine. I set up the share on Windows 7 and on the XP machine the computer found the printer, but told me I needed to load a different driver for it. I pointed the driver info to where we have our drivers stored on the network and Windows tells me it's the incorrect driver.

The strange thing is, when I plug in the USB from the printer to the XP machine and point it to the EXACT SAME driver to install, it works fine. However, when I set up the share in XP, and try to connect to it in Windows 7, it asks me to manually locate the driver, which Windows 7 has built in to the OS. And HP does not provide a Windows 7 driver because of this.

I would also like to add that I did try to load additional drivers (in the printer sharing properties) but my only options are x64, x86, and Itanium based. We use Lenovo (primarily) computers and the driver we have on the network (which I THOUGHT was x86) will not load (Windows 7 says the driver does not contain the right information for x86 architecture.)

So that's the dilemma. If anyone has ANY suggestions, I would love to hear them. Thanks in advance for your time!

Ok, this reply comes a bit late, but I found your post having the same problem. I found a solution:

You have to add the printer according to this manual written for vista.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us [...] 77d47fe3a2

Basically

Start > Printers > Add printer > Add a LOCAL!!!!!!!!! printer (NOT network!)> Click on ‘Create a new port’ > ‘Local Port’ > ‘Next’.

The port name will look like this: \\Computer name\printer name

Then you will have the option to chose the printer from the dialog known from XP. I chose the driver from Microsoft (HPA) and it works, didn't test the one from HP.