HP Officejet 6500A Plus will not maintain wireless connection reliably

Question

For the HP EXPERTS on Expert Day, April 18, 2012:
B.L.A.T. (Bottom Line At Top):  We have an HP Officejet 6500A Plus purchased about 5 months ago.  We wanted to use it as a wireless-connected printer in another room besides our home office.  It is useless to us because it will not maintain its wireless connection, even sitting just a few feet from the router in the same room.  Except for numerous hours of troubleshooting, we have left it sitting powered up, but unused and idle, for almost the entire 5 months in our home office.  DURING ALL THAT IDLE TIME, IT HAS LOGGED OVER 3,200 DISCONNECTS, at a consistent rate of 24 disconnects every 24 hours, even though it ALWAYS reports that the wireless signal quality is “EXCELLENT” (all this is according to the Wireless Network Test Reports we’ve printed throughout the last 5 months).  So our question is, what is it that this printer is trying to do once an hour over a wireless connection that is causing these thousands of disconnects?  And how can we stop it?
NOTE!  Before you round up the usual suspects (namely our router and our PC firewalls) please note that we also bought an HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus ON THE SAME DAY as the Officejet 6500A Plus.  The 8600 was also installed with a wireless connection, and has worked without a single network issue for the entire 5 months.
NOW, FOR THE REST OF THE STORY…
WHO WE ARE:  My wife and I have worked on HP equipment for 33 years, starting in 1979 as corporate customers of HP when we worked for Exxon; then we both worked for HP directly for 17 years; and we’ve now used dozens of pieces of HP equipment in our home during the last 12 years in retirement.  We’re primarily software folks, so we’re not exactly experts in hardware and networking, but on the other hand, this ain’t our first rodeo either.
OUR CONFIGURATION: 
PC’s – All running Windows 7 x64 with all important patches applied and Norton Internet Security 2012:  HPE-270f and HP AIO 200-Quad, each with full 6500A and 8600A drivers installed on wireless connection.  These 2 PC’s themselves can connect either wirelessly or via Ethernet to our home network.  The 270f has a dual-band wireless board.  Both bands work.  We also have a new dv7t laptop with only the full 6500A driver installed via wireless connection.  The laptop is now upstairs and it’s connected to our home network wirelessly without any issues.  (This is where we had hoped to also put the 6500A, but it needs to work reliably via wireless connection.)
ROUTER:  Netgear N600 WNDR3700 providing Ethernet and wireless networking.  Router provides a very strong wireless signal throughout the house.  No wireless problems with any other equipment including an iPod, two Kindle Fires besides all the HP equipment.
PRINTERS:  Besides the two HP printers, the HPE-270f PC has a Canon MP960 installed on it.  And if we can’t get the 6500A working right or replaced with something that does work right, we may be buying our second Canon printer.  By the way, on the 6500A, ePrint and App’s are set to ON, but of course they’re not being used, just like everything else on this AIO.
OTHER:  We also have a Sonos music system that connects to our network via Ethernet and has its own proprietary mesh network (on another frequency) for transmitting ripped music wirelessly to speaker units throughout our house.  (If you aren’t familiar with this totally cool system, check out sonos.com).  We’ve never seen any evidence of interference between these two wireless networks, or our wireless phone sets either.
HP TOOLS AVAILABLE ON ALL 3 PC’s:  HPU
UPDATE 5.003.001.001 (reporting everything up-to-date); HPHDU 3.1.0.17; HPPDU 5.0.0.015 and HPNDU 4.3.0.002. 
SYMPTOMS:  The 6500A Plus installs quickly and easliy, and connects wirelessly just fine during installation.  But sometime over the next hour (usually less), it disconnects and won’t print from PC applications.  Sometimes the application puts up an “Unable to communicate with printer” screen, even though the PC usually thinks the printer is “ready”.  Other times, the PC thinks the printer is offline (but printers don’t have “offline” buttons anymore!).  Often, if you just leave everything alone, the 6500A will somehow reconnect and print out the spooled file 5-30 MINUTES later.  So it does usually seem to be able to recover given some time, but that doesn’t always fit our schedule!   Occasionally, turning the wireless radio on the printer off and back on will fix it right away.  But usually, you have to power the printer completely off, and then back on.  As far as we know, that always fixes it…..until the next disconnect a few minutes later!
PREVIOUSLY TRIED:  After reading some of HP’s wireless network support websites, I manually assigned a fixed IP address to this printer.  It didn’t seem to matter; according to the wireless network test report, it still logs disconnects at the rate of one per hour, and all the failure symptoms were the same.
We also dabbled a bit with setting this printer as “trusted” to the Firewall, but that didn’t seem to matter either.
Next, we connected the printer via Ethernet.  The printer immediately started to work, even though it had just been in its “failed” state over the wireless connection.  As far as we know, it never failed while connected via Ethernet.  This seems to point to a purely wireless hardware/firmware problem on the printer itself.
Late last year, I tried two different chat sessions about this with the inter-continental AIO support teams, each one lasting several hours.  Unfortunately, none of their optimistic solution scripts seemed to fit our problem.  They both seemed determined to reconfigure the 6500A as a TCP/IP printer, which of course worked fine initially, just like everything else.  At this point, they would understandably want to close the chat.  But 20-30 minutes later, we could no longer print to it.  During the second chat, they got into one of our PC’s remotely and effectively turned off the spooler (by selecting “Print Directly” or something like that).  After that, all was well again (as usual) UNTIL the printer disconnected, at which time attempting to print from that PC would HANG the application (since the spooler was no longer buffering) and eventually hang the whole PC.  One giant leap backwards.  That’s when I gave up on the multi-hour chat sessions.
The three diagnostic utilities (HDU, PDU, NDU) have been tried over and over.  When the printer is in its disconnected state, the DU’s usually don’t detect the 6500A at all, or if they do detect it, they are unable to fix anything.  Frankly, it’s easier to just power the printer off (which takes about a minute) and power the printer back on (which takes more than a minute) and then wait for the spooler to kick in (usually about 30 seconds).  BUT WE DON’T CONSIDER THAT A SOLUTION!!
B.L.A.B.  (Bottom Line At Bottom):  We have used up nearly the entire black ink cartridge and at least a ream of paper troubleshooting this brand new printer, to no avail.  This printer is useless to us unless it can maintain a wireless connection reliably.  Please help!
Thanks –
Bob and Jane
(Note: we have an appointment from about 11:20 am EDT – 1 pm EDT, 8:20 am PDT till about 10 am PDT)

Answer 1

I bought the Officejet 6500A Plus about one month and have experienced the very same problem. I tried to remedy this problem following suggestions in a number of different posts (static IP, router, firewalls etc), all to no avail. Last week I called support. The support I received by the tech over several hours and different days for a week was very good. However none of his suggestions corrected the connection issue. After today's recommended fix failed, he advised HP is aware of this issue with the 6500 and other affected printers. He claimed HP was working on a firmware upgrade. He did not know when the update would be provided. The tech also claimed HP acknowledged this problem in a written announcement. He agreed to email the announcement to me. I haven't received it. This has been the only problem I've had with the 6500