I finally whipped this SOB !!!
In trying to get a Vista Basic laptop to connect to a shared XP HP Deskjet 2230 in my home network, I'd tried most of the suggestions on the thread (and a lot of others, too)
The Vista machine would see the XP shared printer and go through the setup process and even say it's been sucessful...but no print. I could see the print request "hit" the destination printer, so figured the problem was the driver.
Then I remembered that during the original setup, Windows would load the driver automatically by going to the other computer. What I think had happened is that that driver was the XP driver, not the native Vista driver.
So here's what I did.
I had originally setup a Local Port on
\\share computer\share printer .
I setup a another Local drive on LPT:1 and forced the driver selection to Windows Update. It took a while to find the Vista driver for my printer, but it loaded.
Now that I had the Vista driver for my printer loaded (over the earlier one) I ssimply went back to the LPT:1 printer and changed to the correct Local Port in the printer properties/port selection,
Hope this helps someone else.
Larry
K9LMM