Open Office, Firefox, IE Won't Print

Here is my problem. Until two days ago everything worked. I have not changed anything that I know of, but suddenly OpenOffice, Firefox, and IE won't print to my network printer. In fact, it seems they will not even get to the point of sending the job to the XP print-spooler.

What happens is the following. I will select print, and the requester come up with the various options and the network printer as the default. I click the print button, and the small window that indicates it is processing the print job comes up, but then for all three of these, the program freezes up. No job shows up in the printer window. To unfreeze them I have to restart the XP print spooler on that machine. Then they will error out. I don't know if they would do so if left, because after 5 minutes I figured I had waited long enough.

I have not yet tested this with my inkjet that I can plug right into my laptop because It is currently not accessable to me. Nor have I tired to directly connect the network laser printer to my laptop to see if it would print that way.

However, I have tried several other things that would print. Click 'n Design (my CD label printing software) works fine. A Disney program that prints out Winnie the Pooh stuff for my boy works fine. And a print test works fine.

My setup is a XP Home laptop connected through a wireless router (although while on my desk it is wired to the router) to the other machine with the printer which is a linux box running Samba and CUPS. Other machines on the network seem to print fine (all Windows 2000 boxes), but various programs on this one don't.

I have tried re-installing the programs. I wanted to re-install the printer, but it will not let me delete it.

If anyone has suggestions as to how to get this working without reinstalling XP, I would appreciate it as I will have to print up my sermons for Sunday.