After recent W10 upgrade, Epson Artisan 50 printer stops printing

The desktop PC knows it's there: if I turn it off, it shows Offline and when I turn the A50 back on, it comes back. Ditto for plugging and unplugging the USB cable

• When I print to it, the Epson Status Monitor comes up briefly as if it were printing, but the A50 doesn't do anything, feed paper or print. Same with a nozzle check.
• I have downloaded the latest driver, removed the queue and reinstalled it. Nothing changes.
• if I go into Printer Preferences and Maintenance and invoke the Epson Status Monitor, the SM can't communicate with the printer....says Searching and eventually Communications Error. No ink level info is shown.
• A50 was hub connected; I connected it directly to the PC, no joy.
• Queue is empty. If I attempt to print, the job appears briefly as does the Status Monitor, but both then are gone and nothing happens at the printer

And yet: if I take the A50 to my laptop (also W10 at the latest level) and attach it there, it prints fine! And I am using the same USB cable on my desktop where I have the problem. Have tried other cables, no joy
It's like all print jobs submitted to the A50 are going to /dev/null (if you know of Unix)

Background info: I have four printers connected to my desktop PC that has this problem,

1. a Brother duplexing B&W laser,
2. a Canon D420 B&W laser all in one copier/scanner/printer,
3. an Epson 4900,
4. and this Artisan 50.

I have tried removing all queues except the A50 and disconnecting the other printers' USB cables and then a cold shutdown and reboot, but no joy.

The desktop is a wonderful old Alienware Aurora R4, 16GB RAM running W10 Pro 64 bit, Version 1709, OS Build 16299.155, says it's up to date

...power it down, then, on the PC, remove it in Device Mgr, Devices & Printers. Then power up the printer and reconnect the USB. That worked. Your suggestion probably would have, too. Also there's a section in manual about waving frozen chicken wings around the PC in the support docs...
The constant W10 updates are asking for trouble:

• Keyboards & printers are one thing but what if it happened to USB and storage processes, lunching data?
• I'm an old techie and I can (hopefully) make it work, but what about Joe or Jill Notech? This kind of thing becoming routine poisons people's expectations of computers. The normal becomes that computers are buggy and undependable. Is everything going to work this morning? That's not funny, all my special fonts are gone! The keyboard buffer is screwed up and I can only type in one character a second. My client wants a proof and the printer has wandered off in a weird way.
• In his classic book, The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks writes about how, over time, patch gets piled on patch, the people that really understand the innards get shuffled off or promoted and unintended consequences catenate to make things buggier and buggier

Simply put, Microsoft should go back to once or twice a year crit fixes and release new versions (W11) every couple of years. Stability should be as important as up-to-date security

Thank you, thank you