Networked Printer Disconnects After Time

I have a small network, three computers - one printer attached to a Windows XP Home box via USB. That printer is shared among the other boxes. One machine I just put Win7 RC on it, connected it (via the instructions I found here in the forum from Jimbo, I believe) and it worked. Hooray. After a period of time, however, it stops working.
I'll send a file to be printed and it will simply never get processed. Two ways I've found to make it print: One, shut down the program I'm printing from and reopen it. Secondly, if I do a soft reset of the printer and then re-print the document.
I've checked power settings to make sure there was no funky printer hibernation thing going on, and everything looks fine. Also, when I print and nothing happens, if I open the printer queue, there are no pending print jobs. It's like it thinks it completed the job, but never did.
Any suggestions?
FWIW - the printer is a Brother HL-1440....

ronkeller8,

I have found a temporary fix same as you have but nothing permanent. I have a situation where I'm connected to a home network and the printer is recognized for a current session and everything works well from all clients. Once I end the session, shut down the printer, come back a day later, I'm unable to print. Status says printer is offline when it's actually online. If I remove the printer (Lexmark) from the printer from the current installed devices and reinstall, everything is fine and all clients can print. This happens over and over.

For whatever reason, the OS is not retaining the settings.

Thanks for the info. I've since moved the printer from the XP machine to the Win7 machine (locally). It seems that the problem is specific to a MS Access based program that we use. For some reason, it prints *most* of the time. I'm still working on resolving the problem, but when printing from other programs, I don't seem to have any problems.
Printers are notorious for driver problems with new OS'. If I can't resolve it (I'll post here either way), I'm going to need to get a newer printer (the Brother HL-1440 I'm using is going on 5 years old).
Ron