/private/etc/cups folder is missing

Question

I am working tech support for a college and a faculty member currently working abroad called in with a problem that Microsoft Word for Mac would lock up everytime he tried to save or print a file. I remoted into his machine and I tried the usual suspects and was able to determine that nothing would print at all from any app, and in fact when I went to system preferences and tried to open the printers, it locked up system preferences. Digging deeper, I discovered that I was getting this message in console:
com.apple.launchd[1] (org.cups.cupsd) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
The error kept repeating. I researched and found this thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2151368?start=0&tstart=0
Which led me to try these terminal commands:
sudo cp /etc/cups/cupsd.conf /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.old
sudo cp /etc/cups/cupsd.conf.default /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
I got an error in terminal that "No such file or directory existed"
So I checked and sure enough, inside of /private/etc/ there was no folder for cups. Its just gone. I assume that the folder being missing is the root of the problem, but I cant figure out how to get it back for him, especially considering that I am trying to assist him remotely. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

# Become root
sudo -s
cd /private/etc
# Make the tar archive in /Users/Shared
tar -cjvf /Users/Shared/cups.tar.bz2 cups
# Exit being the root user
exit
cd /Users/Shared
# Check the contents of the tar archive
tar -tvf /Users/Shared/cups.tar.bz2
drwxr-xr-x  0 root   _lp         0 May  6 17:33 cups/
dr-x--x--x  0 _lp    admin       0 May  7 18:05 cups/certs/
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp      4524 Jan 20  2012 cups/cupsd.conf
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp      4380 Dec 23  2011 cups/cupsd.conf.O
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp      5978 May 13  2010 cups/cupsd.conf.bak
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp      6091 Jul  6  2011 cups/cupsd.conf.default
drwxr-xr-x  0 root   _lp         0 May 13  2010 cups/interfaces/
drwxr-xr-x  0 root   _lp         0 Apr 30 10:10 cups/ppd/
-rw-------  0 root   _lp      1624 May  6 17:33 cups/printers.conf
-rw-------  0 root   _lp      1624 May  5 16:53 cups/printers.conf.O
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp       172 May 13  2010 cups/snmp.conf
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp     52273 Jan 13 06:43 cups/ppd/Brother_HL_5140_series.ppd
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp   1072994 Apr 30 10:10 cups/ppd/HP_Photosmart_C4200_series.ppd
-rw-r--r--  0 root   _lp   1072931 Apr 21 13:08 cups/ppd/HP_Photosmart_C4200_series.ppd.O
-r--r-----  0 root   admin      32 May  7 18:05 cups/certs/0