Where have all my printers gone?

A networked Win XP computer worked fine on Friday. On Monday morning the guy couldn’t print. He looked in Start / Printers & Faxes to find he apparently didn’t have any Printers at all!

The problem was traced to the Print Spooler (Control Panel / Computer Management / Services).

Although the Startup Type was correctly set to Automatic the spooler had not started. Starting it manually (a click at the top left corner of the pane) restored all printing capability, the Printers & Faxes window was once again showing all the printers and he could print on all of them. So far so good!

Shut down and re-start. Oops! No Printers! Looking in Services again showed that although the Startup Type remained correctly set to Automatic the spooler had, again, failed to start and this situation remains.

Weird! Any ideas on this one? Thanks in advance.