USB printer needs to be "initialized" via virtual machine in order to work

I have an HP printer, model ENVY 4500. It used to work smoothly in Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04. In June I upgraded to 20.04. Since then I have not been able to have it work properly: it is correctly recognized but when I try printing anything, it prints half page then it hangs. Same problem with the scanner. I happen to use quite often a Lubuntu 16.04 VirtualBox virtual machine and I discovered by chance that if I release the USB printer after that it has been captured by the virtual machine, then the printer works smoothly in 20.04. The scanner is fixed too. My guess is there is a USB device drive

Question by brad on Super User, licensed CC BY-SA. We show a short excerpt and link to the original thread as credit.