George-

>>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.

Ah. The critical question to ask the original poster.

> 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.

Yup. Me, too.

> While we may not like it that much,

I love it, actually. Printing (esp. over network) is so much less of a hassle now than 10 years ago.

> 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.

My sediments eggzactly.