You can do a search here and find lots of posts dealing with problems with HP printer drivers. Word and Excel are either working around the problem in the drivers or they are not calling the same problematic entry points in the driver. See this message for one reference:
http://www.levelextreme.com/wconnect/wc.dll?FournierTransformation~2,15,655371>Thankyou for your reply. I was wondering if you or anyone could provide with more insight into this. This problem only started happening in my Visual Foxpro Application when I upgraded from VFP5 to VFP6. This Hanging of the computer is also corrupting a few of my customers data and I am having a difficult time trying to explain why a printer driver would not be compatible with our application. Is there anything specific in printer drivers which could be causing this problem. The drivers work fine with Excel and Word.