>George-
>
>>Even Windows doesn't know the status of a printer. That's for the driver to handle.
>
>Thanks for confirming. I hesitated to make such a definitive statement in an area not my specialty.
>
>What I'm not quite seeing is how the printer being unavailable is locking up fox programs, but it's probably just a failure of my imagination.

If you're accessing the printer directly, as Elmer mentioned, yeah, it'll happen. Of course, I stopped doing that mmm...about when Win3x came out. It just didn't make sense with the various combinations of printers etc. While we may not like it that much, I think letting the driver handle things like the printer being off line or out of paper, or off completely, makes life so much easier and takes some of the complexity of development out of our hands.