We [the engineers and me] tried everything, including shared thru a local workstation or attached to an HP print server. What bugs me is that everything was working just fine and dandy when it took it upon itself to give up. It should have been a case of plugging in a replacement for the bust printer, but it didn't work out like that.
Tomorrow I will try installing the driver suggested by Maxell as a first step.
I'll let you know what happens tomorrow - if I haven't taken a sledgehammer to it in the meantime!