Printer Problems with Mac Mini

My mother has a Mac Mini (1.5 Ghz G4) and she's having quite alot of problems with printer drivers. She first had an HP 5440 and it started printing without black. It would print black the first page but then would just print in color. So we then printed with a Lexmark X515 and it did the same thing. I tried the updated company drivers and generic GIMP drivers. Both gave me the same results. Also messed with every Quartz filter and paper quality. On top of that, I did a reinstall of the system (not a clean install) and it's doing it again. I'm guessing it's the some sorta printer cache. I did permissions repair BTW. What could be making the printers do this? I don't want to revert to a clean install, but it may be the only way to completely fix the situation.

 

I'm printing from all sorts of apps: Safari, Word, Appleworks, whatever, no change.

I didn't swap out the USB cable. Can't do it right now since i'm not over there at the moment.

And i did a printer driver test where it bypassed the system and sent the test page straight to the printer. printed fine. no problems.

And the HP 5440 was at least in the list of supported Apple printers because that said Mac OS X compatible on the box. And Lexmark is just s*** and they have s*** drivers, but it ended up doing the same thing. :-/