Well, for the moment, Pprune is behaving itself.
It suddenly occurred to me that I used my - rather low level - password that I'd used for Pprune for many years, to be my Win 7 password. I wonder if in some way they found out about each other, and, in a fit of jealousy, caused chaos.
Now, here's an interesting thing.
Above, I described my LaserJet 4 P installation. The menu that popped up over the normal installation knew what printer I had. I had never told it! The disc had been formatted prior to W7's installation. This seems to be saying that the printer's information was carried back up the Parallel printer cable.
We used to do wondrous things with parallel ports, so I know their potential, but I thought accessory information gathering was a USB function idea.