As somebody that's been working on computer hardware since the early-to-mid 90s, installing the drivers before connecting the printer was the norm. It was actually the norm for most peripherals. Just be glad you didn't have to do manual irq assignment. Hell, that is probabaly the issue, is that the driver installer borked the irq assignment when the device already had a handshake agreement with the hardware.
I digress though, this shouldn't have been the pattern for a modern printer in 2007, when PnP had been standard for several years at that point.