ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Forum- M51T + Printer = ???

A few months ago I bought an M51T (thats what is says on the bottom of the laptop, not sure if its a Ta or the other model) Asus laptop from newegg.com and I've had absolutely no complaints...except one.

For the life of me I can't get it to work with my printer (an HP 5180.) I'll tell it to print something off say microsoft word (and the same applies over all applications. It wont print off excel, powerpoint,firefox, you name it), the document will go to the printer queue (you know? "1 print pending") and then it'll just disappear. The printer wont even respond.

Here is what I know...
-First, I took it up with HP's tech support. We tried reinstalling the drivers (repeatedly), we tried different drivers, we tried all kinds of stuff involving deleting files from core windows locations that's a little over my head. They finally gave up and said that they'd exhausted all options on their end and that I'd need to look elsewhere.

-I'm running window's vista, and I installed window's vista certified drivers.

-I know its not a performance issue. I got 3 gigs of ram and a 1.9 (1.8? heck I dunno) ghz dual core processor.

-The printer itself is working fine. I can get other computers to print off it just fine. I can also get it to print manually fine as well (diagnostic and test pages and directly inserted media cards like what you'd use with a digital camra)

-I'm using the right kind of USB cable. I think it might be needing something extra but I'm not really sure. Rather than the thin, rectangular plug in that seems to be pretty much standard in USB drives for the printer side of the cable its more square like (USB 2 maybe? I don't really know.) The printer just doesn't have a normal USB plug in, and the only other slot is for an ethernet cable.

Any ideas?

Thanks.