Printer issue w win7 and usb receipt printer, local downlevel doc ?

My new windows 7 computer is a dell package from staples. It's an Inspiron 660, 3 ghz, 4 megs ram, 64 bit, intel pentium processor. It's running Windows 7 Home edition. It's on a 'workgroup' network with two xp machines, one of which shares data files that reside on the win7 machine.

My usb receipt printer is an Epson tm-u220D. This printer is not plug and play, so the driver had to be downloaded and force fed. No problem there really; after a few tries we got the printer to print a test page and the accounting software (Bottom Line Accounting) seems to recognize it fine.

This setup is used as the cash register in a retail store, and prints receipts for customers on paper rolls.

Here is the minor glitchy problem - when we print a receipt it prints fine, but then we can see the red error light on the printer start flashing, and the next receipt won't print until we switch the printer off and back on. Also we see a local downlevel document in the queue that goes away in about a half minute whether we turn the printer off or not, and it instantly disappears if we do turn it off.

It's gonna be a pain to switch the printer off and back on between every two customers.

Surely there is an easy fix for this problem - any printer experts out there? Thanks in advance!

bump

thanks for the reply, and you got me on all counts...

1. the drivers are probably older ones as that's all that we found
2. not savvy enough to have even known about compatibility mode
3. yea its a home pc but it was cheap

guess it's not going to be as easy a fix as I hoped, although if swapping ports helps, that's pretty easy - we'll know as soon as I get to work!

i think there are no win7 drivers for this printer - epson doesn't even provide the drivers that ARE available, they come from elsewhere