I hope this is the final HP PhotoSmart C6250 horror story I post here 
The printer hardware itself is fine although it is (1) extremely noisy during startup and (2) locks the PC it is connected to if it is on during boot up. However, I had to remove all the printer’s applications software from a Windows XP networked PC this past weekend after suffering through weeks of slowness and occasional system freezing. The problem was that HP’s application monitoring software would go into some kind of endless loop if the printer was not turned on and, therefore, undetectable. Since HP’s software had been unable to actually work with the networked printer for the past two weeks anyway, I didn’t see much point in debugging it further. The XP PC runs much much faster now and has not locked up since removing the HP software this past weekend.