i am totally aware of that.
it's just that i had a lot of software issues with epson printers, when migrating to snow leopard.
and i'm sick of epson and apple playing ball...
maybe i should just update to mountain lion ?
but then i'd have other issues with other software.
so i'm kind of stuck
but thanks for the comments anyway
stephan
I have many customers on Epson printers including 3800's with Lion and Mountain Lion printing just fine (not sure but probably a few still running Snow leopard although I wouldn't recommend that with CS6 or LR 4 even though Adobe says it's OK). the symptom you describe does not sound like normal problems with Epson/Mac printing, even back to the snow leopard problem, and there really wasn't anything about LR 4.4 that should have broken printing based on the pipeline.. Not saying that it isn't, just doesn't sound like anything I've seen or heard on forums before.
If you've fixed the issues going from Leopard to Snow leopard, and have installed the correct drivers, things should work, but upgrading the OS is certainly something that you might want to consider. Currently epson and Macs play together just fine. Even with Snow leopard, once Epson updated the drivers things were fine, and most solved these problems a few years ago, but who knows what current software like LR is expecting.
You may want to take a look at
this, and do a complete clean out of the printer system. If you do decide to upgrade to mountain lion, I would recommend a fresh install then migrate your data and resintall your apps. This will get a lot of stuff cleaned out (much which has nothing to do with this but good to get rid of it).
Make sure to never install Apples Epson driver updates, they are designed for the consumer printers, you will lose many of the options that are needed for their better printers.