Unable to print in Illustrator CS3

Question

I am now encountering my recurring problem - trying to print one of my maps.  To give some background, this is for a boardgame and consists of almost solely Illustrator effects.  There is a small amount of material from Photoshop incorporated.  It consists of some 20 layers of various effects, and was generated in Illustrator CS 3 (13.0.2) under Mac OS X 10.6.8.
Over the years, I have generated a number of large maps, for various efforts.  These range in size from about 6-12 sq.ft.  All the maps are generated in Adobe Illustrator, ranging from Illustrator 10 to CS3.  The maps are generated on beefy hardware platform (MacPro, various iterations, lots of RAM), with no problems in generating the map artwork.
However, over the years, when it comes to trying to print of of these  maps, I am almost completely unable to print them.  I dont have access to a large format printer, so I try and print these using various small size printers, and tiling the pages.  However, this inevitablely fails.  I am unable to print on any printer, under any OS (Mac OS X or Win XP), with any hardware, with any settings I have tried.***
The current effort is an .AI file of about 100 MB is size. I have also saved this same file as a PDF (flattened layers from AI, ~100MB in size), and as a PDF without Illustrator editing capability (this reduces the file size to 12 MB).
I have tried using Illustrator or Acrobat to print these documents.  At best, I can sit there and watch the status bar creep to 100%, and then sit there for 15 minutes, at which point I give up.  At no time do any of the printers show any activity.
I have tried printing just one tile (page) of the map, and it does the same thing.
This is of course intensely frustrating to encounter this again.  I cannot figure out why this is happening.  Is there some sort of pre-press operations I need to do ? 
thanks,
Tom
***  There is one exception.  I have a small Brother HL-2270DL printer attached to my home network.  Using Illustrator, I can print the entire tiled map in a matter of a few minutes.  I have no idea why this works. Acrobat still totally fails.  As satisfying as actually printing something out, I need a color print.

Answer 1

Mike, while I am currently struggling with this one file, this same issue has dogged me for many years, over several different files, with, as far as I can tell, nothing in common, other than I generated them (the problem lies between the keyboard and the chair ? : )  Each of these maps is heavy AI work, with gratuitous use of textures, patterns, swatches, brushes and feathering effects.  There is a little bit of PS Placed artwork, but not much.
I will see if leaving out the placed artwork makes things work better, but the amount of Placed artowrk is pretty small.
What really baffles me, is that in its most distilled format (PDF with no Illustrator editing), the file is only 12 MB.  I cant fathom how a 12 MB file can present a challenge to any computer made in thre last 5 years.
I havet not yet explored the Advanced printing options, and I dont know what most of that does (even after doing AI for 8 years or more, I am still a hack).
Is there a good book that explains the different printing options and strategies ?  I am flying somewhat blind when it comes to something other than simple printing.
One further data point:  I opened up the previously mentioned 12 MB PDF, using Photoshop.  I rasterized the document to the tune of 300 DPI, and then saved it as a Photoshop PDF.  My thought was that opening in PS destroys any vector information and saving back out as a PS PDF then puts it into a form I could print from work.  From work, I opened this file on a Windows machine with plenty of horsepower and resources.  I attempted to print to a beefy Xerox 7xxx series office printer.  I tiled the document an hit "print".  The progress bar stayed at 0% for 20 minutes.  During that time, the CPU load ranged from ~5-20%, and the free RAM stayed at about 1.7 GB.  I checked the printer during this time, and it registered a print job, but no progress was made.  I gave up after 20 minutes.
thanks,
Tom