[wplug] cups went crazy

[Brandon Kuczenski]

Recently I installed a printer on my laptop (IBM T23, RH9).  The printer 
is an HP deskjet 3520; I used the deskjet 3420 driver.  It worked fine; I 
printed out lots of stuff.

Today I wanted to print out something else, but as soon as I sent the
print job syslogd went absolutely crazy writing the following message
constantly (to the tune of dozens of times per second) into
/var/log/messages:

====
Jun 21 18:53:22 deepblue kernel: [cfe680f0] link (0fe68062) element 
(0767a000)
Jun 21 18:53:22 deepblue kernel:   0: [c767a000] link (0767a030) e0 
Stalled CRC/Timeo Length=7 MaxLen=7 DT0 EndPt=0 Dev=2, PID=2d(SETUP) 
(buf=0585c71c)
Jun 21 18:53:22 deepblue kernel:   1: [c767a030] link (0767a060) e3 SPD 
Active Length=0 MaxLen=0 DT1 EndPt=0 Dev=2, PID=69(IN) (buf=06485f5b)
Jun 21 18:53:22 deepblue kernel:   2: [c767a060] link (00000001) e3 IOC 
Active Length=0 MaxLen=7ff DT1 EndPt=0 Dev=2, PID=e1(OUT) (buf=00000000)
Jun 21 18:53:22 deepblue kernel:
Jun 21 18:53:22 deepblue kernel: printer.c: usblp0: error -110 reading 
printer status
====

The process responsible wouldn't respond to a kill -9 and I had to 
shutdown to get it to stop.  Even after I entered the shutdown command, 
the screen was just full of that message being dumped constantly into 
messages.  I had to do a hard reboot.

1) what happened?  How do I go about determining what happened?
2) In the future, how do I regain control over my computer?

-Brandon