Laser printer glitch

I'm printing with an old LaserJet 6MP. Since this printer has a parallel port, not a USB, and my G4 Quicksilver has no parallel port like my older Macs did, I've connected the printer to the Mac with a parallel-to-USB converter cable, which (as you would expect) has a parallel connector on one end for the printer and USB on the other end for the computer.
This setup has always worked fine in the past. Now, however, a glitch has developed. When I hit the print button, instead of printing immediately like it always used to do, I often get a long pause in which the HP Laserjet HP window says "sending the print file" while that horizontal blue barber pole spins. This will go on for a minute or two, and then, instead of printing, the window says "jobs stopped." If I hit the "start jobs" button, once again the window will say "sending the print file" but this time the page will print immediately.
So I can continue to print that way, waiting for "Jobs Stopped" and then hitting "Start Jobs," but it sure is slow. Is there any way I can make the printer return to just printing immediately, without the long pause and then stopping the job first? What's gone wrong?
Thanks much for any help.
Tom

Yes, it's been a few more days now since my last post, and that printer is still working great, with lots of use. This driver Greg showed us works perfectly with the converter cable. At the local computer store where they sell these parallel-to-USB cables, they carry different brands of them, all for around $30 each, and I've bought three of them now so that I and my relatives can keep using our old parallel-port laser printers. All three of the cables came with software, but all of the software was for Windows; nothing for Mac. And that's all right as long as OS-X recognizes the cable and printer as USB, as my previous experience shows. But OS-X seems to run into trouble from time to time--it worked well when it worked, but was never quite glitch-free. Sometimes when it acted up I'd have to delete the printer from the printer list and reinstall it to get things working again. Finally, it had so many problems that that solution didn't work anymore. Something must have gone wrong in OS-X. That's when I came here for help.
However, after installing this driver Greg showed us, all is well again and the driver/cable combination seems pretty robust. I have been using all sorts of features of this printer such as choosing different page feeding trays, printing selected pages and page ranges, and everything works great (knocking on wood now). It seems to me that with this driver and any of the parallel-to-USB cables available in computer stores, old parallel-port laser printers can now work fine with new USB Macs. And these old LaserJets are pretty bulletproof. The one I'm using now has over 80,000 pages behind it and still works like new. Toner cartridges for the LaserJet 5MPs and 6MPs are available in any office supply store, and you can sometimes find the printers themselves in second had stores and thrift shops for a pittance, as people got rid of them when computers went USB. Years ago I spent $1100 for this 6MP at Best Buy, and I consider a $30 converter cable to be a cheap price to keep it working with my G4 Mac.
Thanks once again, Greg!
Tom

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