Net Use printing

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

This is in the hope of saving someone else a bad few minutes.
Anyone with more experience than I with W2K, please comment: was
this a quirk of this system, or a "feature"?
There's one W2K box at the office, with an HP Deskjet (342C)
hooked up to its USB port. For nearly a year now, I have been
printing to that printer from Xy, having originally typed

NET USE LPT2 \\MERCY\HPDJ942C PERSISTENT:YES

at a command line.
Suddenly, it stopped working. I deleted the lpt2 assignment and
redid the command. CMD.EXE reported
command completed successfully
and NET SHARE showed it there, but I kept getting "Access is
denied" errors (that was when I tried to copy filename.txt lpt2
from a CMD prompt; wouldn't work in Xy either).
Went into Printer->Properties, and noticed that Advanced had
"Print directly to printer" chosen. So I changed it to "Spool
print documents," having noticed that all the Windows printer
driver files were in c:\winnt\system32\drivers\spooler something.
Voilà! Print jobs came spitting out, from copy lpt and from Xy,
just as before. Still don't know how the spool setting got changed.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx