Begging for help - upgrade to Karmic messed up my printer

[MadeTheSwitch]

I am really stuck this time and it's a royal mess.

I recently upgraded my machine to Karmic (from Jaunty). The upgrade went more or less fine.

I have a Minolta QMS 2300 DL color laser at home. This printer used to work perfectly for me before, automatically detected and with driver available without needing to do anything special. The same is true for the other laptop in my house (using Jaunty), and used to be true for the Hardy installations before then.

I've been printing to the printer since the upgrade with no trouble, except that the driver kept complaining the printer was out of toner - which is NOT TRUE. At some point today it simply stopped and refused to print anymore, even though the printer has toner.

I tried all sorts of things and eventually in frustration reinstalled cups, deleted the printer, and tried adding it again. Remember that my previous experience is that there is no trouble at all doing that.

Well now I can't find it on the network. So I searched for it based on IP address, which does find it, but the printer is no longer recognized nor is a driver available for it. In fact, no matter how I try to approach it, I can't; Karmic is no longer willing to print to this printer.

I have no idea where to even start with this. I am leaving tomorrow morning on a week-long trip and I HAVE to print several things before then. HELP!

[MadeTheSwitch]

I got the printer working again by rebuilding drivers.

However, I still can't print - it keeps complaining about missing toner, when in fact there is plenty of such.

How is that possible? how do I go about debugging this?