Anne Balish is seeing printing errors when printing to Windows print queues from Mountain Lion:

I have a printing problem that has vexed me for years. I stumbled on a work around that's done the job until Mountain Lion came along. When setting up Macs to print to Canon ImageRunner series printers via our Windows print queues, I can't immediately select the printer driver during the initial setup or I end up getting a prompt asking if I want to print via unidirectional or bidirectional printing. Regardless of which option I choose, I'm unable to print. If, however, I leave the printer driver as generic during the initial setup, add the printer, then go back and change the driver to the proper Canon driver, I don't get the prompt and it prints just fine. Another workaround was to print via straight IP directly to the printer, bypassing the Windows queue altogether.

With Mountain Lion, I'm unable to go back and change the print driver after the initial setup of the printer so my only option is to stick with a generic driver which means my users lose all of the multi-functionality of their printers. Additionally, printing straight IP to the printer has the same problem in Mountain Lion whereas earlier versions of the OS didn't.

Bruce Johnson responded to a previous reader's comment about not being able to change a printer driver with Mountain Lion for a printer connected to Windows. Johnson describes how to do it with the Mac's CUPS interface, accessible from a web browser, and a command in Terminal:

It's possible, but a pain in the butt. First go to the CUPS web interface at http://localhost:631 . Cupsd will tell you that the web interface is disabled and to enable it run: cupsctl WebInterface=yes

To do that, open Terminal and do: sudo cupsctl WebInterface=yes

Then you can go back to the CUPS Web interface and manage the printer. Under Administration, select Manage the Printer, log in with an administrative account username and password and you can then change the drivers about four screens into the management process.

As a general rule, I've never had much luck printing through Windows print queues and have always just printed directly to the printers. Also, this kind of nonsense about printer drivers (among other things) is why we abandoned Canon printer/copiers for Ricoh's.

If you've tried this please .