Digital BW, The Print

Howdy all, First off, great Group you've got going here.  I'm very 
impressed with the dedication with which you folks have thrown 
yourselves into the B&W digital world.  The knowledge base here is 
simply amazing!  That's why I've come here for some help/guidance on 
how to get my 1200/MIS VM combo up and running properly on my WinXP 
system and using Paul Roark's curves. My apologies if these questions 
are somewhat simplistic but I'm new at this and I'm gonna delude 
myself into thinking that there's no such thing as a stupid 
question :-)

First, more system info.  I'm running a new WinXP pro PC.  I've got 
access to the educational version of PS 5.5 and soon I'll have 
Jonathan Sach's Picture Window Pro. I've downloaded Paul's curves.  
I've downloaded and installed the Win2000 driver for the 1200 (there 
is no WinXP-specific driver). I'm scanning in B&W negs and color 
slides with a Canon FS4000. I've tried the printing process using 
both the demo version of Picture Window and PS 5.5.

Now, on to my questions.  1) Roark's workflow specifies "In the Epson 
driver, set Print Space to Same as Source."  well, I would, but I 
can't find this option on any of the set-up/print screens for either 
the Win95/98 or Win2000 print drivers.  And what does this setting 
actually do?  2) Roark also specifies to set the gamma to 1.8, I 
can't do this thru the 1200 printer drivers but can thru the PS color 
space settings but that seems to negates the color space setting of 
sRGB that's also req'd by Roark - where do you set the gamma (if at 
all?).  

I have managed to print some fairly nice prints with the settings set 
as best I can but the prints seems somewhat on the light side, 
lacking much depth and if there are very deep blacks I get 
posterization/dots in the darkest areas.  I can get rid of the dots 
if I play with the curve prior to converting to RGB by toning down 
the blacks a tad but this often leads to flatter prints that lack 
much contrast/depth/detail.  I admit that my monitor has only been 
adjusted thru the Adobe gamma process, nothing more involved.  I have 
printed out Paul's test strip using his curves and they seem fine, 
with nice graduations across the range.  Perhaps I'm just hampered  
by never having seen any B&W digital print other than those I'm 
creating and not being used to printing on matte paper.  Maybe I'm 
mistakenly expecting different over all results - altho the 
dot/posterization problem shouldn't be there regardless, yes?  I'd be 
more than willing to send a sample print or 2 or 3 to any kind soul 
who might want to take a look and tell me if I'm just being crazy :-)

Bonus question - I've also tried using Brandin's workflow/curves for 
the 1200 and end up getting prints that look solarized and very 
blue/purple in the darkest areas.  Any ideas?  I've tried nearly 
every printer/color management combo I can reasonably figure out...

Anyway, thanks for listening and any info that can be spared to shed 
light on this black (and white) art would be appreciated!  Special 
thanks to Vinny Orlando for replying to an e-mail from a complete 
stranger about these same questions.

Cheers from foggy Juneau!
Joe