Comment 10 for bug 174403

I managed to "fix" this one by doing the following (as root or with sudo):

# dpkg -l | grep cups

remove all of the above listed packages with:

# dpkg --purge <package names>

then reinstalling cups:

# apt-get install cups

I think one of the packages I had installed (cupsys-hal perhaps) was causing problems. After removing all packages cups related, and reinstalling the minimum necessary to do the job, things started working again.

I still consider this to be a bug - perhaps there is an undocumented conflict happening.