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So, I finally updated our sunflower iMac G4 to Tiger (OS X 10.4, for those just tuning in). I did this because Erin’s new MacBook preferred to crash rather than print to the iMac’s shared HP DeskJet 810C; relevant support threads indicate that the PPC print drivers weren’t totally happy inside Rosetta. The best known fix is to install the Universal (i.e., PPC+x86) HP print drivers (version 3.3) from the MacBook’s OS X DVD. Of course, these drivers require Tiger, so an update to 10.4 was in order.

The fix worked; the MacBook can now pull up the Print dialog (in which the DeskJet is the default printer) without crashing, hard.

Except that now there’s a new problem: The print queue will randomly stop, mid-job, causing half-printed pages and other mayhem. An excerpt from /var/log/system.log shows why the queue stops:

Jun 26 19:57:31 imac kernel[0]: USBF: 38071.978 AppleUSBOHCI[0x11b2000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 24, timing out!
Jun 26 19:59:25 imac kernel[0]: USBF: 38185.985 AppleUSBOHCI[0x11b2000]::Found a transaction which hasn't moved in 5 seconds on bus 24, timing out!
Jun 26 20:00:43 imac crashdump[6014]: PrintJobMgr crashed
Jun 26 20:00:46 imac crashdump[6014]: crash report written to: /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/PrintJobMgr.crash.log

So the Mac loses the USB connection to the printer. Turns out that others have experienced similar issues when upgrading to Tiger. Any OS X USB nerds (I’m basically looking at you, Manuel) got any bright ideas here?