Installing HP Printer software causes General Protection FAult in print artist ONLY

I had found these two links as well.  The first link talks about using "MKCOMPAT". There is no such file in XP. That whole link may be talking about a previous OS to XP. Can I use mkcompat in windows xp?  Assuming I could, when I was with the customer I tried looking for a copy of "mkcompat.exe" anywhere, but since I don't have win98 on any computers, and I didn't find a copy to download from the web, I gave up. Where can I get mkcompat.exe? I'm searching a win98 install disk but not finding it in there anywhere.

The second link opened this time (yeah, the popups prevented me from reading it when I was with the customer's pc, grrrr). But the situation there sounds different - it was persistent despite instaling to a clean hard drive, whereas in my situation, the problem goes away when I uninstall the hp printer driver. (In any case, the original poster in the second link said the fix didn't work for his problem). And since I've already spent the time to do several installs / uninstalls of the printer and the print artist program, I hesitate to go back to the customer with only this fix in hand... Was hoping for something HP specific.

Just to stress 2 things:

(A) I have a win98 cd and did an XP search on it but did not find "*mkcompat*" on it
(B) The printartist problem goes away when I uninstall the printer driver

Did you see these fixes ?    http://forum.printartist.com/webx?50@958.ZxeIa9PEhAw.2@.1dd9584f

Nobus - Yes, that is the same page as the one that I gave a link to - altho in the last 24 hours my link has gone down (?)

FYI I found a copy of mkcompat.exe, in my win98 se disc, and tried it. It had chinese or japanese writing in the menu bar, and in the file type box, and when I tried to load the print artist execuktable, it gave an error. So forget that.

Just to be clear - yes nobus I did try all those fixes, including - deleting pawin.exe, pixres.csh, holding control & shift when starting the program, moving a bunch of graphics files to another location (in case there were too many files), as well as uninstalling & reinstalling the program.

Besides, these are fixes that fix problems that are persistent once they happen -- but my problem ONLY happens when the HP printer drivers are installed. Once they're uninstalled, print artist resumes working again -- the error goes away!

ok, i resume : print artist does work -till you install the HP software - so obviously it gets in it's way.
that is often not easy to fix, since HP will tell you it's the Sierra software, and vice versa.
maybe upgrading can help - they're at version 22 now i believe

Yes, there's a post about a related issue involving the same error when printing in print artist v4.5, that is at microsoft.com - and their solution was to upgrade. Unfortunately the guy using the computer does NOT want to upgrade print artist even if its free. I told him that the age of the program could make it hard to fix tihs issue. He's swapped printers, and got a HP2170

i see  your point; not always easy to help people then.
it's about all i can think of, so if you want to close or delete the question, go ahead !