For those of you, or those of you with clients, who have MSDOS based programs like Wordperfect and you want to print to a networked printer, this is all you need. This also works for other printers who use USB ports or something other than LPT.

The solution was to map the share to an LPT port using [I]net use[/I]. For example:

[I]net use lpt1 \\printserver\sharename /persistent:yes[/I]

If the USB printer is on your local machine, you can share it and then map this same printer locally to an LPT port.

From Microsoft KB314499

If you or your client is using an old-DOS based program to do work (for example, Wordperfect for DOS) - and you need to print to a printer which is shared on the network, you first need to map the printer to an LPT port. You do this by using the following command in a dos prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd):

net use lpt3 \\SERVER_NAME\PRINTER_NAME

You can then set up your dos program to print to lpt3 and it will be sent to that printer. To print right from the command line, you could use the following syntax:

copy c:\test.txt lpt3