Solving an 'Unexpected error' during printing

Jul 22, '02 08:29:09AM

Contributed by: jurg

Today I encountered (for the second time in a couple of months) a printing problem. When printing started the system (10.1.5) showed a popup with the text 'An unexpected error has occurred' (without an error number).

The first time this happened, it took me hours to discover what causes this. I tried the Print Center repair utility I found at VersionTracker, but it didn't help. In the Apple discussions area, someone mentioned that after changing the rights for /tmp (to writable for everyone), printing worked again. That did the trick for me, too.

Today I checked a second (correctly printing) system and it appears that /tmp on that system is a symbolic link to /private/tmp. So I restored that symbolic link on the malfunctioning system and printing now works again. Apparently I had used an installer or something that had overwritten the original symbolic link.

I hope this saves other people some time when solving printing problems.

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