USB magnetic card reader stops working on Canon iMFP

A symptom is the card swipe “stops working”.  In practice this manifests in two ways:

1. First

   1. User swipes the card, no logon happens but the green LED on the reader stays lit

   2. User swipes the card again, no logon happens, and the green LED on the reader dims

2. Second

   1. User swipes the card, no logon happens, and the green LED on the reader dims

Another symptom is the main LCD locks up when a user presses the “Touch Here To Begin” button.

In both cases the only recourse is to reboot the engine.

Both are caused by a deadlock in another MEAP applet on the engine which prevents the event system from processing events.  This only happens on engines that host both the Pharos solution and Authorized Send version <= 3.5.1.

The act of switching between the MEAP apps (once logged in) triggers the hang.  The total number of switches needed to result in the hang varies from as little as 2 to as many as a dozen or more and transcends logons.

The solution is to upgrade Authorized Send to the latest version (we don’t yet know the version as Canon has not yet released it).  We can wait to add this article to the KB until after we know the version that fixes the problem.

The work around (until Auth Send can be upgraded) is to reboot the engine.