HP LJ 1020 causing print spooler to crash?

I'm having trouble fixing a certain printer problem(I hate printers). My boss has a new Windows 7 Machine running Win7 Pro and an HP LJ 1020. He's had the computer for about 3 weeks and hasn't had any trouble until Tuesday(3 days ago) when the print spooler stopped running. I would restart it, printers would reappear in the Devices and Printers windows, but still couldn't print because of the print spooler. After doing some research I found that Adobe Reader was the cause (which made sense since he could print from word, notepad, or a test page just fine, but the second he tried a PDF the print spooler crashed (he'd been able to print PDF's for the last 3 weeks). I fixed the problem by

• turning of advanced printing options on the printer, having adobe print PDFs as an image
• removing the printer and the drivers for it(minus one that I apparently didn't have permission for)
• deleting the driver reference from the registry

Well it happened again today. He just tried to print a word attachment from his email and the printer light blinked but didn't print. When I tried to checked the print queue I got an error message saying that the print spooler stopped working. I got it working again by taking out the registry entry and the driver files. He's the kind of guy that needs his printer 24x7 so he really can't afford this to keep happening even though I can get it working in a couple minutes. Have any ideas? I'm wondering if the drivers themselves are the cause including the ones that are downloaded from MS update when it gets installed.