Canon printer crash

Trying to help my brother running Tiger on a G5 Tower, he has a Canon Pixma MX860 and the moment he selects the printer from the printer menu the host app crashes. Word, Mail, Safari - whatever app he's using crashes the instant he selects the printer from the print dialog.

I've used Printer Setup Repair to reset the printing system, re-installed drivers, ditched caches, tried printing from another user - everything crashes the moment that printer is selected.

Trying to print a jpg from Preview works ok but everything else crashes. That makes me think it's a font issue - but Font Doctor reports no problems and removing everything except core system fonts still results in crash.

Does anyone have any ideas/experience other than doing an archive & install?

Cheers

James