Prompt is missing for side-2 of duplex printing

I've got a weird one. I use 2-side printing very often. During a system
reboot, the informational message with graphics showing how to flip the paper
and with 2 buttons (resume printing & cancel) in a large box was up just
before reboot. As a result of a uninitialized semaphore, this box will NEVER
re-appear for any future print jobs. Without this box & buttons, there is no
way of resumming the print job on side-2. No error messages, no boxes, no
nutt'ng. The printer just pauses, pauses, and more pauses until I kill the
print job. The job is killable.

The Epson R300 printer was deleted, upgraded, reinstalled, and installed a
"copy 2" of the printer. Problem unchanged with all instances of R300. You
can't print on side-2 without the box (continue printing button). The
"resume" dropdown of the All Active Printers & Faxes does not perform a
resume as it was not "pause"d.

The manufacturer (EPSON) has been no help as it says "it is a weird
problem". I tried all kinds of solutions: 1) printing in "RAW" mode, 2)
changing winprint print processors, 3)turning off sooling, and 4)firing up my
registry monitoring program looking for the semaphore. I even deleted ALL
registry keys belonging in any way with EPSON after deleting printer and
re-installing. No Luck!

The OS is Windows XP Pro with SP3. This problem appeared many months after
upgrading to SP3 so SP3 if not the problem. I still beleive it is an
uninitialized semaphore problem that failed to get reset after a system
reboot.

Reloading the OS is not an option as it a production system running multiple
web servers.