Important for Laptop Users (MacBook, MacBook Pro) With No Physical Connection to a Printer:
If you are having problems with a network printer on a wireless network and you are dealing with a laptop that doesn't have any physical connection to another machine , save yourself some time:
1. Before you start your virtual machine (VM), in your virtual machine settings, set network to 'Bridged' instead of 'NAT'. My VM was Vista Premium Home.
2. Start up your VM, open your browser and download Bonjour for Windows from:
Bonjour for Windows
3. Install Bonjour, and follow the prompts for it to find the printers on your network. You may or may not need to install a printer driver.
I spent a good day trying to troubleshoot how to connect to my D-Link wireless network with a Brother HL-5250DN printer, and all I needed to do was use Bonjour.
Prior to installing Bonjour, with my Network setting on 'NAT' I could not enable my network printer - I would click on 'Enable Printers' but it would uncheck the selection after about 2 seconds, so that I was unable to use "All printers installed on the Mac will be automatically added to the virtual machine".
This information is for network printers (i.e. your printer is connected physically to your wireless router, not shared, where the printer is connected to either the same computer, as in a desktop computer with physical wired connections to printers). Otherwise, you may find the NAT setting to share printers to be a workable option.