Question : PowerPoint 2007 Printing issues - shadows and text boxes

I've been trying for a little while now to properly print a simple invitation for a friend of mine (which I've done dozens of times in PPT 2003 w/o an issue), and keep running into some odd problems.

Letter-sized page, landscape.  Left half has a text box with a few paragraphs of text with a piece of simple clipart over it.  The right half has two thumbnailed .jpg pics with shadows.

My first couple of prints gave me the text box on the left and the pics on the right, but no clipart or shadows behind the pics.  I finally found an article online mentioning clicking "on" the "High Quality" option in the Print dialog, which I did.

With "HQ" turned on, now I get the pics w/ shadows but no clipart or text box (whole left side is blank!).

Print Previews look perfect either way I go, so I don't know the actual final outcome until I actually print.  Printing to a pdf looks good, but printing from here to the printer gives me pics w/ shadows, no clipsart, and where the text box should be are three thick black lines instead.

I've never had this much of a problem printing things out of PPT like this before (2003 and prior) and find this pretty aggravating.

Running Office 2007 Pro on Win 7 Ultimate to an HP Deskjet 9650.  Also tried from PPT 2010 on an XP Pro box, but get similar results.

My initial guess is the HP drivers which stopped at the XP version...

Any thoughts, tips or advice would be appreciated...  Thanks much!

Answer : PowerPoint 2007 Printing issues - shadows and text boxes

Ugh. That definitely sounds like a printer driver issue. Can yoiu update the driver?

One other thought. Since the pix are coming out okay, select the textbox and Ctr+X to cut it.

Paste Special as PNG. Ctrl+Alt+V is a shortcut for Paste Special if you want to use that (otherwise it's the bottom half of the Paste button on the Home tab)  -- then choose PNG. Hopefully that will let the slide print appropriately.

Of course, do this on a copy of the slide, especially if there's a chance you'll need to edit the textbox!