Slow Printer print resposne

Three things to review:
1. Printer configuration: Open the Printers window and check if the READY status is having some delay. If it is, you have a printer configuration problem.
2. Check if you have all the default fonts installed. Maybe the font substitution table is taking some time to prepare itself.
3. Check access rights to the printers. Sometimes, w2k takes some time to find if the user has access to some resources.

make sure that your Printer's NIC speed is not set to hardware default(Try Full Duplex 100, or auto-negotiate), or try printing via IP

I had that problem occur on our network some time ago; the only thing that would fix it was to install the printers as local printers (never did find out what caused the problem though). Good luck, Marg

OK, we see this problem all the time. This also occurs with XP boxes. This does not occur on Netscape or Mozilla. We have seen some other applications that rely on the IE engine with this same issue. What's happening is that when IE6 came around MS changed the way they query for printers. Instead of just automatically accepting the "default" printer, IE searches for all printers along with their current status. If you have a big network and a workstation with a lot of network printers mapped to it, it can be an excrutiating wait. Especially if even one of them is "offline". We could not find a fix for this even within the Windows Registry. Our solution is to 1) install only the printers and drivers required for the user/workstation. Only have 1 or 2 printers installed at the most. This fixes the problem most of the time. 2) If the user MUST (I don't mean to shout) have more than 2 printers installed on their workstation like a graphics artist or engineer/scientist, then make a "dummy" local printer driver which points to an LPT port and make it the "default" printer. You will have to instruct your user(s) to be sure to select the proper printer whenever they print from any application. This can be a pain but if a user has more than 2 printers attached, then they should already be accustomed to doing a printer change on the fly anyway. Last of all, if you're going to have a large number of printers on your network, it helps be sure they are in the online status. Ain't Microsoft a 'kick'? Microsoft still just doesn't have the large user in mind.

upgrade your old machines to XP, its much easier to support machines all the running the same O/S in the long run :)