Comment 23 for bug 475845

After some time spent on testing it seems the problem is related to CUPS / printer driver or GTK print dialogue.

The problem appears if the _default_ printer is using some of HP drivers. I succeed to "almost" solve the problem by changing the driver for my HPLJ 3800DN printer from "HP Color LaserJet 3800 Postscript (recommended)" to "HP Color LaserJet 3800 Foomatic/Postscript". I write almost, because instead of reproducing the problem in 90% I get it in 10% of cases.

Examples of drives which in most of cases don't work:
HP Color LaserJet 3800 Postscript (recommended)
HP LaserJet 4250 Postscript (recommended)
HP LaserJet 4050 Series Postscript (recommended)

and the drives which in most of cases works as supposed:
HP Color LaserJet 3800 Foomatic/Postscript
Ricoh Aficio MP 5000 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.4
HP LaserJet 1160 hpijs, 3.9.8

The other observations:
- when the print dialogue freezes, only the tabs "General", "Page setup", "Text Editor" are displayed; the other tabs are shown when the window gets unlocked,
- for network printers: during the freeze, when the message "Getting printer information..." is displayed, there's no network activity, so it is not about checking the status of the printer. Checked with wireshark on all interfaces (including lo),
- the problem is independent of device URI; I tested: socket://10.x.x.x:9100, lpd://10.x.x.x/PASSTHRU, hp:/net/HP_Color_LaserJet_3800?ip=10.x.x.x and serial:/dev/ttyS0?baud=115200,
- log messages in /var/log/cups on timeout:
  - access_log: "POST / HTTP/1.1" 400 0 unknown-0000 -
  - error_log: cupsdReadClient: 15 IPP Read Error!

Tested on 64-bit architecture.