A:
I have owned three printers which use the HP 02 cartridges for several years, and have similar experience. It appears that small amounts of the ink in a color cartridge are used when the printer goes through it initialization and self cleaning processes from time to time. Eventually you will probably need to replace each of the color cartridges, one-by-one. If you occasionally print in color, I have read that yellow is generally the most heavily used color. This might explain why it was the first to become empty.
Answered on 8/24/2010 by Steve from New Hampshire