Printer goes offline as soon as I boot Windows under Parallels

[MacInWin]

Setup: MBP 8,3 (17" early 2011) running El Cap 10.11.2.
Parallels 11.1.1 (latest updates applied)
Windows 7 as virtual machine.

I have an old printer that doesn't have drivers for OS X or any Windows more recent than Win7. It's a label printer critical to my wife's small business. The challenge is that the printer drops offline in OS X as soon as I start the boot process for Win7, consistently. To get it to work, I have to boot Win7, then unplug the printer USB cable, replug the printer and it appears in Win7, but still shows as Offline in OS X. To get it back in OS X I have to close parallels (after shutting down the Win7 VM) and then unplug/plug it again. I've checked all the sharing boxes I can find, but it's very consistent in this behavior despite changing sharing settings in all sorts of configurations. And, it's only started doing this recently (maybe about when I applied 10.11.2, but I'm not totally certain).

Any hints on how I can have the printer stay online so I don't have to do the unplug/plug routine? Before the problem appeared I had it plugged into a Belkin Thunderbolt hub and it worked nicely, but now the unplug/plug trick has to happen at the MBP port only. The ports on the Belkin are all working fine with other devices and I have even been successful getting the printer online through the hub, but as soon as I try booting Win7 in Parallels, the printer goes offline and the unplug/plug trick doesn't work at the hub, only the MBP port. I can live with it but it's really annoying. I've even gotten to the point of considering BootCamp-ing the Win7 installation just to get away from the hassle of the whole thing. But I thought I'd ask here first, to see if there is a Parallels/Win7 wizard here that has any hints. The Parallels support website didn't have anything about this type of problem that I could find.

TIA,

 

[Bob_Stan]

You should get the option to assign the printer to the mac or to windows when OS X detects it if parallels is running. If you have assigned it to Parallels, I am pretty sure you can "disconnect" it from the device menu in parallels which then makes it available in OS X again. As far as I know, you can't have it available to both operating systems at the same time.

 

[MacInWin]

Thanks, Bob_Stan, I do get that prompt when I connect something to the USB port after Windows has fully booted. But what is happening now is that the printer drops out of OS X and does NOT appear in Windows. And when I disconnect/reconnect, I do NOT get that prompt, but the printer connects directly to Windows. Until a few days ago, when Windows booted the printer just shifted over to Windows automatically and now it does not. And when Windows is shut down, the printer used to just switch back to OS X, now it does not. I have to repeat the unplug/plug routine to get it to reappear. Not a fatal flaw, just hugely annoying. Plus, I don't like changes in how things work when I've made no changes to cause the change. Computers don't just decide on their own to change, something happened.