[cups.general] Printing on cups system

[Adrian Roskrow]

Hi
I have spent the last few days trying to get my cups server working,
originally all was working fine between my linux machines. I stupidly
thought that I would enable some windows machines to be able to print to
this printer. After fiddling around for a while I did not get this to
work, but even worse my cups system had gone belly up on my server,
trying to enable it again using the gnome printing manager brought up
the following error "The CUPS Server could not be contacted" from
System>Administration>Printing. What ever I seemed to do this message
still came up. I tried lpr and this came up "command not found". In the
end I un-installed  and re-installed the CUPs system hoping this would
work, it didn't!!!. Do you have anything else that I could do? I really
need to get this printer working (at least under linux) again.

I have also tried ps aux | grep cup and get nothing found, does this
mean that the cups demon is not active, I have tried to restart it using
the cmd line and there are no errors.

Please please help I am at my wits end and have no further answers!!!

Adrian