>The good news is that maintaining a handle to a dedicated instance of Word has improved performance of document preparation and printing on the client's network by 24 per cent. The bad news is that the printer driver is somehow getting out of sync over the duration of the application session causing print jobs to hang or to generate reams of paper.
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>The printer driver is changed using oWord.ActiverPrinter = PrinterName Does execution of the app continue while this is taking place? Changing printers can be very slow in Word.
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>Another possibility is that the printer driver might be changed by a second instance of Word opened for interactive use. The app prints documents to disk and releases them later as a batch. If the printer used to generate those documents is different than the one to which the batch is released, there will almost certainly be problems. Users have been told by IT not to change the Windows default printer but it could happen.
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>Documents can print to any physical (paper) printer or to an app-specific PDF printer, but there seem to be lots of other choices (many I don't recognize) on their network. It hasn't been a problem until the app started maintaining a handle to Word. Ideas?

IIRC you can obtain a handle to Word's print dialog box. It used to involve the number 88. It's been a very long time since I did that.

maybe Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdWordDialog.wdDialogFilePrint?