ok so the bad news is that pointing directly to the printer ip and using a different updated printer driver did not help.

could it be the setting of the shape to visible or invisible?

also how can I trap the error or get the actual line it happens at? I've been non buffered writing a number out to a log file to try to track it down but it tends to move a bit (it seems) not much just over a few lines.

the fox error says -
fatal error: exception code=c0000005
called from mainform.printjobbag line 0 {innt\system32\vfp6r.dll}
called from bla line 0
called from bla line 0

Why always line 0 ?? darn thing, it's NOT line 0 !!

again here somewhere

fputs(as_plog,alltrim(thisjobid) + " " + "PRINT 1")
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(8).visible = .F.
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(7).visible = .F.
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(6).visible = .F.
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(5).visible = .F.
fputs(as_plog,alltrim(thisjobid) + " " + "PRINT 1.1")
oworkbook.activesheet.printout(1,,1)
fputs(as_plog,alltrim(thisjobid) + " " + "PRINT 1.2")
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(8).visible = .T.
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(7).visible = .T.
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(6).visible = .T.
oworkbook.activesheet.Shapes(5).visible = .T.
oworkbook.activesheet.printout(1,,2)

sometimes it gets to just 1 sometimes 1.1 and most of the time it works all the way, just fails 1 in 20 perhaps, but for a server based program thats designed to just process jobs and does NOT want to be task managered and restarted, 1 in 20 is very poor.

thanks again
Ken.