Printer drivers, how complicated do they need to be?

Now I have had a lot of issues with printer drivers before, huge bulky packages of shit, just to run a printer.  Most driver downloads from HP for example are in excess of 100MB, combine that with their terrible download speeds and your in for a stressful install.

I have just been installing a HP Officejet 6000, nice cheap network inkjet.  Now, I don't want it running of DHCP, so setting a static IP address should be pretty easy right?

Wrong!!

No printers come with LCD screens these days, so that's the first problem.  Easy configuration out of the window (even on some business level lasers).  They now just have a few lights on the front to show when the ink is ran out, not even the level of ink!!  A little LCD can do that FFS...................

OK, my PC just rebooted itself, you know why?  The HP printer shit that was installing in the background decided it wanted window focus to show a message asking if I wanted to reboot my PC please.  Well, I assume that's what it said, I didn't see it, but that's what it did.  It obviously took any keyboard press as "yes" and went right ahead with it.

Anyway, secondly to now having LCD screens, I would expect that they may have a simple web interface?

Wrong!!

I can sort of understand saving money on hardware, like screens, but web interfaces?  That's easy enough right?  They must spend a hell of a lot of time on bulky driver software and they could do away with most of that if they just had a web interface.

So, no screen, no web interface, the only option is to install the software, just to change the dam IP address.  The network printers here get installed on servers, so this software will never be used again.

I installed the software, eventually managed to get the printer detected in the network discover app, carried on with the install.  It then wanted to apply network changes to my machine???  What the hell does it need to change, it's just a printer for frig sake, non of the Konica lasers need this kind of dicking about, so they just have got it right.  So it applied network settings, then wanted to reboot, the reboot above was the SECOND one.  That's right, two reboots for a printer driver install.

Even after the two reboots, it still doesn't work, the driver software helpfully sent of an error report and in response downloaded some generic Vista troubleshooting document.

I have a feeling that when this is all configured, it still won't work on the server.