Printers and Win XP. Anyone got a hammer?

[Gouabafla]

I run a small network at home/office. One desktop with two printers installed on USB leads and shared on the network. Then a couple of laptops and another machine in Number one son's bedroom. Normally printing is not a problem, but today I got 'printer not responding' messages when I tried to print either on the network or from the local machine.

I did the usual thing of installing, uninstalling, switching off and unistalling again. Sometimes this sort of thing fixes the problem, but not today. To add to the confusion, when I tried printing to any of the printers from the properties dialogue (test page), the control panel applet crashed and I was left with the desktop. It sounds like there is a fairly fundamental Windows problem, but I can't work out what it is. Any ideas?


Edited to add that a Windows repair/reinstall didn't fix the problem, nor did moving one of the printers to the paralell port.