Printing jobs disappearing

I just tried printing to a USB printer that is not currently connected to my Mac. The print job just stays in the printer proxy (the print window) with the horizontal barber pole spinning. It never times out or deletes the job.

At what point does your Mac appear to delete the job? Do you see the printer icon in the dock showing the number of jobs waiting to print and when the symptom does occur, is the printer icon still in the dock but no longer showing the number of print jobs queued?

I have the same problem since upgrading to mountain lion. My print jobs disappear from the print queue if I don't connect to the printer reasonably fast. I'm just as annoyed by this and would very much like to know if anyone has a solution for this

I'm having a similar problem since upgrading my 2006 MacBook from Tiger to Snow Leopard last month. Formerly I could send to the print queue and documents would wait for days, through daily reboots, until I got around to connecting to my Brother MFC-7420.

After the upgrade, the documents disappear from the queue after a reboot or the accidental closing of the printer icon in the Dock.

Manually pausing the printer seems to work, as jmm315 suggested last summer, but this is not a user-friendly solution. Any other ideas would be appreciated, including how to nudge Apple to restore the "automatically pause after x minutes of searching for the printer" function. There once was a "Request a feature" link or button somewhere along the top right screen--I remember using it to suggest putting the day/date in the top right corner along with the time--but can't find it now.

(edited to add: just realized this is a Mountain Lion thread, but it's what came up when I searched for the problem)

hey jmm315:

if the printer status is going from yellow to red it will never reach the job queue, I highly recommend that you delete the printer from your list of printers and try to reinstall.