Hi,

> I posted a few days ago about diffficulty printing when other tasks were
> vying for processor time.  If I print on a clean system, I get >4 pages 
> per minute.  When I try to print the same file with lpd at `nice = -20'
> and some other demanding task at `nice = +20' it takes 4 minutes or more
> to print one page.

just to make sure it's not something obvious:

you are not doing sth like:

root# nice -20 lpd
root# nice +20 demanding_task &

???

This would be counterproductive to what you want to achieve.

You should do:
root# /usr/bin/nice -n -20 lpd
root# /usr/bin/nice -n 20 demanding_task&

If you already did the right thing, well, this was just an idea :-)

  Guenther