samba - Mar 2005 - printers offline in 3.0.13 - is it because they are "local printer"s printing to "local port"s ?

Maybe my printers being offline with samba 3.0.13 on some xp pro 
workstations is not a bug after all, maybe it was a (mis)feature in 
samba-2.2?

My problem is that I can't easily test on < 3.0.13, because until a few 
days ago I had been running 2.2.12 and all was fine, then.
No printers showed as offlne.
But then I upgraded to 3.0.7 for a day or two immediately followed by an 
upgrade to 3.0.11 and I only held my breadth to check things when I was 
on 3.0.11 and found that my printers were showing as offline under 
3.0.11, but of course maybe that would have been like that even on 3.0.7?

We have had 3 good reasons to install samba printers on win xp 
workstations as "local printer"s printing to "local port"s
(e.g.
\\linux\printerqueuename)

reason 1 our main email application (pegasus mail) was playing very 
annoying timeout delays with reading emails and going up or down the 
email inbox if the default printer was a smb network printer that was 
unreachable at the time. (for some strange reason pegasus was trying to 
interact with the printer for every msg)

reason 2 just when we thought we should point the finger at pegasus mail 
for this we found that ms word had a similar problem when it came to a 
workstation having the default printer as a smb network printer and it 
wasn't accessible.

reason 3 if we installed the samba network printers as "local
printer"s
printing to a "local port" (e.g \\linux\printerqueuename then we could
install the printer for all users on that workstation and also set the 
default config for all of those queues once for all, from a script. (so 
no need to set the network printer settings and defaults once every login.)

BUT maybe we have to throw out those gains and stop using printers 
defined as "local printer"s printing to "local port"s which
are pointed
at the samba print queue?

Is there a reason why samba changed it's behaviour showing it's printers
as being offline if they are accessed in this way? I guess the question 
to ask is, what status does a win2k3 shared printer show as on a win xp 
pro workstation if one sets the workstation printer up as a "local 
printer" with a "local port" of the name 
"\\sambaservername\printerqueuename". I hope somebody can tell me that
such a setup would result in a printer showing the proper status? 
Because then I am sure samba could be told the same trick, surely?

I am hoping one or two of you can shed some light on this.

Regards,


Urs Rau