Mac beach balls for 30 sec before printing

Question

When printing form any mac program ie) word, textEdit, safari the program locks up, beach balls, and uses about 90% CPU. Only after it does this for *about 30 seconds* the print dialogue box comes up and asks me to confirm the print, and then prints fine.
Any ideas on how to solve this? Might using the repair option on the system disks help?
A few other notes:
1. Can print fine on the Windows side via VMware fusion
2. I have run repair permissions and disk repair in disk utility
3. Running the most recent version of Mac OSX Leopard
4. The printer is hooked into the Mac via ethernet

Answer 1

dito 2.0 wrote:
When you say "Reset the printing system and add the printer queue again" do you simply mean remove the printer form System preferences and then re-add it again?
No. To reset the printing system, you open Print & Fax and move the mouse over the Printers list. Then, hold down the Control key and click. The 'Reset printing system' pop-up will appear. Click it to reset.
This will delete all your printer queues so you will need to add the queue/s again, but your driver software will still be on your Mac so you will not have to install the driver again.
Pahu