>>I am getting the Windows error message instead of the internal Foxpro error message when the printer is not ready. The app is in FoxproLan 2.0 for Dos. Any ideas? I have an ON ERROR routine but it doesn't deal with the printer not ready error.
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>You'd get the FoxPro message if you didn't print through Windows (print manager, or whatever it's called this season). If you are running only this app and nothing else, you may set the printer not to spool MS-DOS jobs, which would send your app's output directly to the printer. However, if there's something else competing for printing, you'll get a much uglier message from Win - like "another application is using LPT1: ... would you like to" kill it, strangle it or ... whatever; it would confuse your users much more. It confused me some when I first saw it.
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>Under Windows, generally, printing is the OS's job, and all the apps simply submit their print jobs to it. This also means the app will never know if a printer is out of paper or busy - the OS will report that the print job is accepted, and the app will think that the thing is actually printed. It's only queued, really. Now what happens later with the print job (all the print jobs, actually) is something handled by Windows. I said, you can change that, but you may run into other troubles if other programs try to print while you print.

Thanks Dragan,
I actually figured that out before I got your message. Somehow the setting had gone back to spool print jobs instead of print directly to printer. I checked a users printer as well as he has had some printing problems lately too. Sure enough hte printer was set to spool.