Epson Stylus COLOR 3000 prints all in black and slowly

[JanPer]

I have had a SC3000 printer connectedin a network using PrintSir print server for several years. Today while printing a PDF from Arcobat Reader 6 some troubles appeared. The PDF itself took too long to print (about 30 minutes one A3). It stopped for about ten minutes, then printed one third of the paper and stopped again. Finally it printed the file out. The quality was usual. I have set the printer driver to 'BLACK' to have BW output. Afterwards I wanted to print out a DWG file from ProgeSoft IntelliCAD (I've never done it before). The printer started printing immediately, but the output was BW, however it wans't supposed to be. All colors were printed in black (even pure C,M or Y) and the print took too long. The printing head mover very fast, but the paper hardly moves. It seems like a very detailed printing method. After about 10 minutes the printing was finished and the outpud quality was usual. There was no distortion or skew, but all the colors were black. Since then all the printings look like that - regardless of the software I'm printing from. I've changed the printserver and tried even the original LPT cable. No change. I plugged the printer into different computer and tried original windows driver. No change. I've tried it under windows XP Pro, windows XP Home, Windows 2000 and now i'm about to try even Linux. There was no change. But when I press reset button on the printer, it starts to print usual ASCII data in PROPER speed, so there cannot be any mechanical error. It seems to me as a problem of the printer's firmware...