Ik, Pardon me. I thought it was a home network.
You have a specific need and it seems that XP is not keeping the network connection
open for printer jobs.
If this were my problem in a commercial place, I would go for a quick and sure solution
rather that trying understand what XP is doing.
Software solution:
Set up some kind of background task the starts a 'null' print job about once every
minute or two. This could be a simple thing written in Visual Basic or C++ or whatever.
A 'null' job would be just some characters that will not make the printer print,
but wil force XP to start and finish a print job For most serial printers, the hex
chars 00 and 7F just waste time and do not print. The printer may also have a reset
sequence that could also be used to waste time and force XP to keep the connection.
Hardware fix:
You can do a serial printer wired directly with two computers with a hardware thing
doing time share.
