Printing woes - please help!

[Michael J. Sherman]

Ok, let me preface this by saying I've used Linux since 1993, so I'm no newbie. 
But setting up a printer is driving me insane.

It's a canon printer attached to the parallel port.  Used to work just fine with
RedHat 8 and lpr (before all this CUPS jape).  So now I have Fedora Core 1 with
CUPS and nothing works.  Let me sum up what I mean by "nothing":

1) lpq results in "lpq: get-jobs failed: server-error-service-unavailable"

2) In Gnome, bringing up the Print Manager shows no printers, even though i've
set it up in CUPS using the web interface.

3) However http://localhost:631/ shows my printer.

4) No applications can print (gimp, mozilla, OpenOffice, etc).

5) My other computers cannot connect to and use the printer

6) Even in the web interface I cannot even print a test page (it just hangs).

Please, please.  I need help.  Setting up a printer should NOT be this difficult.
 But it is.  I'd like to just start from scratch with CUPS, but even reinstalling
the CUPS rpm package didn't wipe out my old printer definition.  I have a feeling
this is the result of the myriad of different ways of doing things, CUPS, KDE
print, Gnome printing, LPR, etc, all getting mixed up and not working together. 
I've googled for days and have found NOTHING useful.

Please help.  Why is it so difficult?

-- 
Michael J. Sherman | msherman at stealthboy.com
"There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those who understand
binary, and those who don't."