I have an audit program written by me in dos which I use, and it
prints fine on win98se but having to swap over to xp by end Jun 06, I
find that the audit prog works fine on screen, but even though I have
an lpt1 port and centronics connecton on printer, it wont print. It
says its printing but nothing happens. Its as if the spooler
disappears into thin air! Has anybody found a way to print from dos in
xp please?

This may be helpful:

http://geekswithblogs.net/dtotzke/articles/26204.aspx

Rainbow~

Interesting question!

I've also got some DOS programs that I've written but, as I rarely use
them now, I've never had occasion to try printing under XP which has
become my OS of choice.

I've never tried but maybe you could partition your disk and install
Windows 98SE (that will run DOS) on one partition?

A pretty drastic remedy!

I wrote a large DOS system that is now legacy.

It uses Int 17h (LPT interrupt) hard coded to 1 for all printing
ie: it prints to LPT1

It is still running on an XP Pro machine, so what you need can be done.

Unfortunately the site is rather remote, so I can't find out how they set it up.

I vaguely remember them telling me that reports did not come out until
they exited the program ... can't be sure there.

One thing I would try is disconnecting the current printer driver from
LPT1, things don't like two different Apps latched onto the same
physical port.

Thanks Rainbow - I read the blog on dos printing from xp and have
learned enough to know that it is a fluke if you can get it to work.
That is good enough for me because I have plenty of printers and
computers and with the slim sceens these days, I have just decided to
run two computers each with its own printer on the three workstations
I have at work. That way I can have the best of both worlds and I am
sure I will easily get used to using the one computer for dos progs
and the other for all the other progs I use.