This does work programatically! The printer settings persist.
If you mean that you don't want the user to have to supply the file name, then I don't know if you can pass this to the printer driver. You may have to use some third party software.
The driver is a network shared resource and in addition is used on any given user profile for a number of different applications, therefore I really need to explicitly set this up when my database is opened, so yes I do not want any manual process for configuration.
My fear was that Access97 provides little if no support for what I require, Access2003 is much better for this however our client PCs have Access97 installed under a contractual arrangement so we cannot upgrade.