I just don't get this.  Our Vista laptop was sending print jobs to our 
SL CUPS server with perfect success for months now.   The print queue on 
the laptop was called HPC4400 and the queue was specified as 
http://192.168.1.30:631/printers/HPC4400.  Like I said, everything was 
working.

About a day or two ago, the laptop could no longer see the printer. 
Using wireshark first on my server and then on the laptop (by installing 
the Windows version for Vista), I determined that the SL machine was 
pingable from the laptop, the CUPS server web interface could be seen 
from the laptop, but the print queue could not be found, even by 
specifying the same exact name as it had originally (see above).

After poking around a while, I noticed that the name of the queue on the 
SL box was now called "Photosmart-C4400-series" not "HPC4400." I did not 
do anything to the CUPS server on my SL server, so I fail to see how the 
name could have changed!

I've seen many instances of Windows suddenly no longer able to "see" the 
printer on the SL server, and each time, it seems, there is a different 
reason why.   This is the first time I have noticed this specific scenario.

I am wondering if some system upgrade occurred automatically which, in 
turn, automatically reset my CUPS server to some sort of nominal 
configuration, calling my printer by some default name chosen by the 
installer.  But this doesn't seem likely, though upon occasion, I've 
seen some weird upgrade issues with some Linux installations; that has 
been rare, admittedly, and not this type of issue.

Does anyone here know of issues of this nature?  Have I forgotten to do 
something to my cups configuration that may have allowed this? At any 
rate, it would not seem very "unixy" to me, having been working with 
*nix* systems for over 3 decades.

Thanks