Leopard printing problems on several printers (Am I the only one?)

Question

Since installing Leopard shortly after it was released, I've had flakiness with printing:
- With Tiger, when I printed, I could open the printer's window, and see the print job queued. The job would finish, disappear from the window, and everything would be fine.
- When the job was printing, the printer icon would appear in the Dock. When the job was done, the icon would disappear from the Dock. Simple.
With Leopard, printing has worked, but I have never seen a print job appear in a PrinterProxy window. I print, the printer outputs the job, and PrinterProxy is always blank. The printer icon appears in the Dock, and stays there forever. I found that I could ctrl-click on the icon and select the Auto Quit option (Hooray!), but that only worked for a while. Then the icons started staying in the Dock again. When I click on the Dock, there is no more Auto Quit option... just the "Application Not Responding" message. I have to force quit Printer Proxy after every time I print.
What's stranger is how long it takes for the PrinterProxy app to start up. The icon in the Dock bounces for well over a minute. Sometimes, the job finishes printing before the app is launched. If I switch between apps using Cmd-Tab, I can select the PrinterProxy app, but it never actually displays; instead, I just revert to the current window.
This is true for every printer I use, and as a traveling consultant, I use several. It is true whether I am printing via Airport, or over a direct Internet or USB connection.
The printers that are permanently in my Printer List are:
Canon i9100
Brother MFC-8840
Epson Stylus Photo 220
HP LaserJet 1320N
HP LaserJet 8800
HP LaserJet 6570
HP Color LaserJet 5550
Adobe PDF 8.0
All of these have the same problems. What's worse is, when I have a printing problem, there is no way to diagnose it, since the print jobs never show up in the PrinterProxy.
I have reset my printing system many times. I have deleted and re-added my printers many times. I have downloaded drivers from the manufacturer's sites, and reinstalled Leopard's default drivers. Nothing makes a difference. Strangely, after updating to 10.5.2, the Auto Quit problem went away for awhile, then returned spontaneously.
At the thread below, I show some of my system and crash logs from a prior discussion. Someone was helping me with the problem, but after asking me to post my logs, he seems to have dropped off the thread.
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7013209#7013209
I can't believe this problem is endemic to Leopard. I know many people who seem to use Leopard without any problems at all. (They even print once in a while!) And yet, as a fairly advanced user, I can't believe I'm the only one having this problem! My system is pretty plain vanilla, with no weird mods, hacks or apps. Pretty much just straightforward creative and productivity apps. I use it daily for business, so I try to keep all wacky stuff off of it.
There must be a solution, short of doing a clean install. Can anyone help? Are there PrinterProxy-related files I can delete when I reset the Printer System that might help resolve this? Prefs?
Thanks,
David

Answer 1

I'm having exactly the same problem with a Lexmark C760.
When I inspect the Activity Monitor while opening the Printer Icon from the Dock (or press the Button "Open Print Queue" in the "Print & Fax" System Preferences), I can see the Printer Icon as "Printer Proxy (Not Responding)" marked in red in the processes list. The Dock icon bounces for quite a while, and after about 2 minutes, a Printer List actually appears under the PrinterProxy application and the process in Activity Monitor changes its name to "(null)" and its color to black.
Though there is no entry in the PrinterProxy list when I print something from another application while keeping the window open, I can select "Supply Levels" and the correct information appears, so it seems to be functional.
It also seems that there are several copies of the drivers remaining, as the application in the Dock is named "Lexmark C760 (4)", probably from my attempts to remove and reinstall the driver. Is there some interference with old installations of the drivers that still lurk somewhere, hidden in the depth of the many libraries? How can I get rid of the previously installed drivers for good?