Printing

We have recently bought a new computer with Windows XP
Home Edition. Now, after sending a document to print
(whether it be from an email or Word)we are unable to use
the computer for any function until the print request has
finished. When we clicked Print spooling off, we were
able to go into other programs, but not the one we were
using. For instance, if we were printing a Word
document, we could not open another Word document, but we
could open and look at our emails. If the email had an
attachment in Word, we could not open that. Can anyone
help us to find out what needs to be done to fix this
please? We did not have this problem with our old
computer under Windows 98.