[wplug] Too busy printing?

[Weber, Larry A]

A month ago our home PC mercifully committed harddrive suicide and took its
M$ operating system with it.   A new drive and Fedora Core 3 got us back up
and running quickly.  Everything has worked great for a few weeks.  The wife
quickly adapted to FireFox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.

Then this weekend we attempted to print an email attachment (from Borders).
It printed fine.  And then it printed again.  And then the PC just started
banging away at the harddrive.  I could not get control to find out what was
running.  I had to turn the PC off and reboot.  A couple of seconds after
logging back in as the user the printer prints the email and lock-up.  If I
am quick I can get a terminal window open which prevents the harddrive
accesses.  The printer queue was empty and I could not identify any task
that would cause this problem.  I un-installed the printer and it appears to
be o.k. now.

Other than the "lp" commands is there anyway of tracking what the printer is
doing?  If the PC is busy 100% on some task is there a way to break the
operation, equivalent to the three finger salute?  I want to reinstall the
printer but am concerned that it will start up this cycle again.

-laweber