>I have to maintain a 2.6 system. In the past it has been printing the results of a run to the printer. Recently many clients have got USB printer connections and the old system, of course, can't recognise one.

Actually DOS apps can be made to print to some USB printers. The basic idea:

- you need a version of Windows that supports local printer redirection (everything except XP Home and [maybe] low-end Vista versions should work)

- you turn on printer sharing, and you make the USB printer shared (e.g. \\MyPC\MyUSBPrinter)

- you redirect a DOS printer port to the shared printer e.g.

NET USE LPT1: \\MyPC\MyUSBPrinter /persistent:y

Now, anything you send to the DOS LPT1: port goes to the USB printer.

The reason why I say "some" USB printers is that some are strictly Windows printers (won't support DOS or any other OS) because all page formatting and rendering is done by a Windows print driver. These so-called GDI printers are common because they are very cheap but they have significant limitations.

To see if your USB printer can even support DOS printing, go through the steps listed above, then binary-dump a text file to LPT1 (in a CMD window) and see if it prints:

COPY SomeTextFile.txt lpt1 /b