Epson Scanner/Printer recognized but "not connected"

[dark_mail at gmx.net]

Some days ago I updated cups to 1.2.6 (1.2.7 is not yet marked stable on Gentoo), and now my Epson Stylus Photo RX420 scanner/printer combo doesn't print anymore. Scanning works fine.
I can install the printer without any problems, it is automatically recognized during installation, but when it comes to printing, no matter what, it doesn't work, not even a "cat file.txt | lpr".

When accessing the cups daemon via webbrowser, cups starts processing the file to be printed, but complains about "Printer not connected; will retry in 30 seconds..."

I switched to "debug" in the config, but that only flooded my terminal with debug messages within seconds. If you need some info of this kind just ask.

One thing which looks somewhat weird is the URI of the printer:
usb://EPSON/Stylus%20Photo%20RX420
Before I reinstalled the printer, it was /dev/usb/lp0.

I'm using the gutenprint 5.0.0 driver and a vanilla 2.6.18 linux kernel.

I hope someone can give me some advice on this.