Standard TCP/IP Port vs. Network Printer

I'm charged with setting up systems for public access labs in an AD domain.
Each lab is equipped with a workgroup laser printer which has a server-based
queue (Win2K Server). When configuring the "reference system" I've been able
to point all users to the network printer by either a registry modification
or by modifying the default user profile. So, a few of the Ghost images that
I maintain for these labs differ only by the fact that they point to
different printers. I'd like to keep the number of images down to a minimum.

I recently discovered that I could (remotely even!) install a printer on a
lab system with the Add Printer wizard and if I used a Standard TCP/IP port
(instead of the regular wizard process of picking one out from the domain),
then that printer was immediately available to all users, preexisting and
new. This got me excited, until I started to wonder if this practice would
be "safe".

Basically, mounting the printer to the system using a Standard TCP/IP port
makes the printer behave like a local printer in its availability to all
users on the system. In another newsgroup an MVP told me that this method
would bypass the queue on the server and go directly to the printer whose IP
address I put in as the port. If this is true, then in the lab setting, with
many users hitting the printer simultaneously, losing the queuing
functionality would be pretty bad I guess??

My question is how bad would it be? Is it worth testing? Or should I just
keep mounting the networked printers as I have in the past, with a separate
Ghost image for each lab?


thanks, Dave