Digital BW, The Print

Les,

If your print file sizes are anywhere near 100Meg, 2 Gig (contiguous?) 
free disk space may simply not be enough and, if you are printing from 
Photoshop, your computer may be using your primary drive for Photoshop's 
"Scratch Disk" which, ideally, should be a dedicated partition on a 
separate drive and as big as you can spare, but at least 5+ times your 
largest file (including all layers etc.). Photoshop is a real memory 
hog, there should be nothing competing with it, that you can avoid. 
Printing will compete with Photoshop and, if you are trying to work with 
Photoshop while printing, you may pull HDD and memory resources from the 
printer - I don't know if there is a way to fix this, but you may be 
able to make printing top priority at the expense of whatever else is 
going on.

Photoshop and your OS (Windows?) both need simultaneous access to a hard 
disk for normal functions and they should not be the same HDD, even if 
they use separate partitions. I think the ideal system setup is: OS on 
one HD drive, Photoshop on another, scratch disk on another and OS 
"virtual memory" (WindowsXP nomenclature) on a fourth HDD. Such a setup 
minimizes conflicting HDD accesses between OS and Photoshop (at least in 
Windows - don't know about Macs).

Frank