If you are printing to a network printer and are experiencing a printing delay (the print job will immediately start only if you exit the software), you can tell the printer not to spool or make one of the following adjustments:
WIN 3.1/95/98
Change the settings in your SYSTEM.INI (WIN 3.1 or WIN95/98 PC's) to include the following:
[Network]
PrintBufTime=1
[ifsmgr]
PrintBufTime=1
If you already have a [Network] section just add the PrintBufTime line to it. If you do not have a [Network] section, add it after your [386Enh] or equivalent section. Under WIN 3.1 you may have to remove the network protocol and re-add it if you receive a network protocol error. After saving these changes, re-boot your PC before they will take effect. An easy way to edit your SYSTEM.INI is to select RUN and then type SYSEDIT. You will need to do this to every PC on your network that prints to a redirected (non-local) printer.
NT/2000/XP
In WIN NT server/workstation (and presumably the same for 2000/XP), there is a Virtual DOS Machine (VDM) related registry entry that determines the wait or timeout period when printing from a DOS VDM based print job. The LPT_Timeout value entry (type REG_SZ) in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\WOW
determines the wait time. The default value is 15 seconds. Presumably the value should be set to 1 although experimentation may indicate some value between 1 and 15. This change would need to be made to every NT workstation on the network.