November 16th, 2006 
admin One of my clients had recently bought a new Lexmark printer. She was going through all the boxes, manuals, disks, etc. So, she thought she would hook it up. She unhooked her current HP Laserjet 4050 printer and started to hook up the new Lexmark. Then she changed her mind. She put the Lexmark back, deciding to hook it up at a later date (she had various reasons which were good ones).
But, when she went to print to the old HP printer, it came up with a very strange error message. This message was printed on the paper from the printer. It read:
“PCL XL Error subsystem kernel error illegal operator sequence.”
She was befuddled. So, I received a distressed call from a person with no printing capabilities. Fortunately, the fix is very easy. I simply deleted the printer and reinstalled it. It must have been an issue with the printer driver getting whacked. So, if you get that message, try that first. If not, comment or send me an email. We’ll get it eventually.
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Ashish
Hi,
I had same problem with anothr printer that was HP.It was 2 yrs back but same probs and yeah removing older files works.
Its windows lol
Ashish
I have same problem but I tried previouslly uninstalling and installing again but It didnt work… any ideas please?
repair the registry key with norton’s windoctor or similar software. reboot system. print testpage
hi guys,
i have a simular problem. one of my clients just bought a new lexmark printer (x340) to replace his old lexmark printer (x215). when he prints, instaed of printing the document it prints an error.
pcl xl error
sysbsystem: is kernel
error: illegal data length
operator: read image
position: 17
We are having 10 IBM PC in which we are trying to install HP Laser jet 1320 but error message PCL XL5 position 6 is comming . But the same printer gets install in HP Machine. Can you please help us in this matter since vendor says mother board is having problem.
I changed the driver to the basic HP Laserjet driver. Then I went into printer configurations and turned off advanced printing features. This was the only thing that worked for me.
We have a Lexmark C540n. When attempting to print large (5mb+) artwork files we receive an error:
PCL XL Error / Subsystem: Kernel / Error: Illegal Tag / Operator: 0×11 / Position: 36160
I have messed around with all kinds of settings but I can’t seem to fix it. Any ideas??