This appears to be a widespread problem and one clearly caused by SP2. I've
rolled back some of my machines to SP1 and the problem immediately
disappears.

Certain of my applications (commercial ones we sell), actually crash when
one attempts to bring up a print cycle on certain SP2 machines.

I've noticed that the problem is possibilty tied to the type of video
display hardware one has. I have machines with mother-board based Intel
video chip sets which have no problem with SP2. But machines with NVidea,
ATI, or S3 video chips seem to have this problem. After my program errors
out, going into Display Settings gives me a message which suggests that the
video adapter memory has been corrupted.

There are some threads which suggest that the slow-printer-dialog problem
can be solved by completely removing all printers and then reinstalling
them. This has not worked for me. Dell support recommended reinstalling
the video drivers on my newest development machine (XPS Gen III). I did
that 3 times with no success.

In my custom code, I've traced the problem down to a WIN32 API call
CreateDC(). In my applications, this returns with an error code 119 (Bad
Driver according to WINERR.H). The printer data being input into CreateDC()
looks fine.

So I'm suspicious that the problem is somehow tied to CreateDC() in the SP2
edition of GDI32.DLL.

Best

Harry