I solved my problem - more or less. Maybe it's just my old computer with the bad juju, but if this happens to you, you are going to love this one.
First, I was trying to print a small envelope in filemaker. It didn't work, so I tried to save as a pdf and then print. That didn't work either. I then tried printing anything in either program and nothing worked. I tried printing an old Word doc, and that didn't print - even though it had in the past.
Every time I tried to print, it would say the printing of jobs had stopped and would I like to continue or add to the print queue. This would come up regardless of whether or not there was actually anything in the print queue. I downloaded a new print driver, repaired permissions, checked connections, and of course restarted the printer and computer at least 15 times.
I tried merging my address info from filemaker into Word, just to see if I could do it, and there, finally, I got a message that my envelope size was too small. Why the HP printer window couldn't tell me that is ridiculous (it probably would if I had a pc!). So I enlarged the envelope size to a default one, but it still didn't print. I changed it to 8 x 10, and that still didn't work.
Out of desperation, I opened up an old tried and true Excel doc and tried printing, and it did! And that magically unlocked the printer problem. I could print anything after that - with the exception of the too small envelope size. I could go back and print the larger sized envelopes to which I had previously changed. All of the programs worked, as long as I started out with a correct document size. If I try again to do something too small, the same vicious circle starts up that no restarting or changing of the size can fix.
Maybe there is some other way to get out of the printer circle of hell - I mean, this solution does sound ridiculous, but this is what worked for me.
