Troubleshooting Printing?

Hi All,

I am having trouble with a printer, it's a DataMax M4208 Thermal Label
Printer. What we are seeing is that print jobs from one of our applications
are being dropped. They spool, get printed and then deleted out of the
queue like normal except the printer doesn't do anything. This only happens
out of an application we use for running our business. If I print from Word
it works just fine, have yet to see a dropped print job. So I'm thinking
there is something wrong with the output from this application but need to
be able to demonstrate it to the vendor or they are just going to point the
finger at the printer. I have three of these printers and they are all
behaving the same.

My question is then, how can I troubleshoot this? One way that I was
thinking was to trap the print job and view the escape characters being sent
to the printer. I'm thinking there must be something wrong with the print
job itself and the printer is just dropping it. So I thought if I could
somehow save the print job to a file that I could edit I could compare a
working print job to a non-working job and show that to the software vendor.
Make sense?

One friend of mine suggested changing the printer port to File and then the
print job would be saved. Then I'd need to get a hex editor to review the
file after that. Well I tried that and got the file but when I drop the
file back onto the printer it errors saying the file is in the wrong format
to print. What am I missing here? I'll need to be able to print these
files so I know which are failing and which are working.

I hope this makes sense, or am I approaching this wrong? Any suggestions on
hex editors? This a Windows XP workstation ,sp2, connected to the printer
via Windows 2003 server and TCP/IP. The printer has a built in network
card.

Thanks in advance,
Linn