>In your printer's Port settings (on the DETAILS page of it's properties sheet), try de-selecting "Spool MS-DOS print jobs" . It did the trick for me. Printing will start immediately for DOS programs, but Windows programs will still spool.

Tried that, too, but then if there's a DOS job active, and another app tries to print, it receives an ugly message which surely confuses (my) users and makes even uglier phone calls.

I never had problems like that when I was printing under Lantastic or Novell. They simply made no difference - the jobs spooled at equal speed from both Dos and Windows (though I wasn't particularly lucky with Lantastic over Windows or vice versa).