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The error that comes up is that the windows box is busy or down. When I enter the ip address of the windows box as I set up the printer on the Mac it seems to find it fine.

With regards to windows boxes, there are two kinds of network printing. There's printing via a Windows Shared Printer, and then there's IP printing, which is a different animal.

I don't remember clearly how the Mac makes the distinction between the two. But I'm wondering if you're asking it to do IP printing, but the printer is shared via Windows Sharing.

I also remember needing to jump through a certain hoop on my Mac before I could print to one of the Windows Shared printers. It had something to do with installing a generic sort of driver for some kind of legacy printing system via Samba. I don't remember exactly what it was I had to do, but in the end I had to choose a similar-but-not-exactly-the-same printer model, and had a very limited amount of control over the printer's features (couldn't print in high quality for example). I remember having to look this up in the Mac help to learn how to set it up. Wish I remembered the name of the thing I had to install.

There are a couple of other possibilities... There may be a driver conflict on the Windows side, you might have to update the drivers on the Windows box. Check the Microsoft Knowledge Base for articles about this (yes, I know you're on a Mac, but you'd be surprised how much they support this kind of thing).

Another possibility is that the Windows Firewall is blocking one of the ports the Mac needs. Try temporarily turning off the firewall and see if that fixes the problem.