Vista Printing/Resource Issue

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Hey guys, let me start out by saying that I have Vista running fine on my desktop and laptop at home. Dad just upgraded to a new Dell Vista laptop. It has plenty of specs.

He takes it from home to work and there are USB printers in each location. There is also a network printer at work.

Dad complained that his laptop was slow, so sure enough, I checked and it's at a constant 80% CPU utilization. Mine sits at 1%. I checked processes running, and it didn't tell me a specific one.

I have traced it down to printers being the issue. When he brings it home, I can unplug all USB printers, stop the print spooler service and reboot. It comes back up and is running at normal fast speeds again, with no CPU utilization. I plug the USB home printers in and it wrks fine.

The issue comes back whenever he goes to work and plugs in 1 USB printer and 1 network printer. High CPU utlization again. I know for a fact that work is using XP drivers for both the network printer and USB printer as there are non avail for specific printers. Would this be causing the issue?


Issue number 2: Dad had a USB HP1012. It stopped working, so we wanted to take it out of the mix. Unplugged it, but it didn't remove itself from "printers" in Vista. I tried to delete, but it says "Error - Deleting" on the printer icon. We can't seem to get this cleared out.

Issue 2) check to see if it shows up in device manager and see if it deletes from there.

Issue 1) try to not plug in the network printer and see if he has trouble.
This will help to isolate the problem.

EDIT I found this concerning networks that could shed some light.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233/en-us