[Hampshire] Not broke, but 'fixed' anyway

I usually accept any updates which Debian offer, but this has begun to lead
to all kinds of annoyances.

I use CUPS to manage a network printer, but I tend to turn on just those
bits of the network that I need rather than consuming electricity
pointlessly. So, if I don't plan to use the printer then I don't climb up to
another room in the house to switch it on.

Just recently, a message has started to appear every few seconds: 'Not
connected? Printer (xxx) may not be connected.' If this message is cleared
it reappears after a few seconds, blanking out rather more than a third of
the toolbars at the top of my spreadsheet, browser, or whatever I'm using at
the time. 'Hide' makes no difference; it overrides it, anyway.

Can anyone suggest a way of suppressing the irritating printer message,
other than leaving it switched on all day?

Chris.

p.s. The most recent version of OpenOffice no longer 'greys out' the Save
icon after the file has been saved, so there's no visible indication of the
need for a further Save. Grrrr...