Help resolving some hp officejet d145 color issues?

Greetings all!

I have some questions about color printing with my hp officejet d145
all-in-one printer.

We've had this printer for about a year (?), but we don't use it that
often, so this machine has suffered very little "wear and tear." The
colored ink cartridge that came with the printer just ran out, so we
recently replaced it with a new one, but did not replace the black
cartridge, since it is still at around 40% (and has not expired).

My wife tried to print a page of photos in color today, and it came
out mostly yellow-ish, so she printed a Self-test Report. The test
revealed that the magenta was not printing at all, and the report
indicated an "IDS failure." To rememdy this, she cleaned the
printhead contacts (as recommended by the online HP support site), and
also, in the general course of things, used the Maintenance menu to
align the printheads, and to clean the printheads.

The test page was run again, and although we could still see some
horizontal lines in the magenta (and a bit in the black too), the
report indicated that the printhead status was "OK."

Question 1: Is it normal to see some horizontal striation running
through the test patches, even if the heads/cartridges are fine? Or
should I expect the test patches to be totally free of horizontal
striation?

Question 2: The onscreen User's Guide (of the officejet Director)
recommends using the Maintenance menu to do the automated procedure
"clean printheads" (which we did). But under the Troubleshooting
menu, it says to use the Maintenance menu to do an automated procedure
called "clean print cartridges." However, "clean print cartridges"
does not appear under our Maintenance menu (we only have "clean
printheads"). Cleaning cartridges also does not appear in the hard
copy user's guide. The only cartridge cleaning mentioned in the
User's Guide is cleaning the CONTACTS, which is done by hand. Is the
Troubleshooting guide using the term "clean cartridges" to mean "clean
printheads" (i.e., are they the same automated procedure)? If not,
how do we (and should we) perform the clean cartridges operation?

After all the cleaning and testing we did this morning, we re-printed
out the page of pictures that came out so abysmally the first time,
and the colors were much, much improved...nearly perfect at first
glance...but a closer look revealed that the colors were more "washed
out" than they should have been (colors not as vibrant/warm as they
look on the monitor). Admittedly, in this instance we did not print
on photo paper (although it was otherwise high quality paper), and so
tonight, we'll check again using photo paper (but I am not
optimistic). We have noticed this lack of color warmth happening
before today's printhead problem too (even on photo paper), but at
that time it only happened when we tried to print with software other
than HP photo printing -- this time it happened even with the HP
software. I suppose we can adjust the color settings so the image is
slightly more "vivid" and "warm," but I would like to think that
default settings should produce "true" colors.

Question 3: Are there other maintenance operations we should perform,
or other diagnostics we should run? Is there any point in trying the
color calibration feature? That sounds a bit risky. It bugs me to
have to keep wasting ink on all these tests (test pages account for
about half of all the printing we have done with this printer), but I
want to be sure the printer is printing as well as should be expected.

Sorry this is so lengthy! Thanks in advance for any advice!

Chuck

P.S. Our print quality setting is set to "best"