Finally got to the bottom of this one folks, thanks to all your efforts,
Gringo's remark about it maybe being a hardware/bios problem set off a
light bulb. A couple of weeks before installing mdk 2000.1 One I needed
to change the cmos battery on the motherboard, this must of messed up the
bios. I reset it back to its origianl state, the parallel port setting
was wrong, and yeh har I can print again. So thankyou gentlemen for your
assistance.

Regards peta