Windows 2008 R2 - Printer "Offline" SNMP issue.

The issue:

Not unique from what I have read in these forums and elsewhere around the globe.  But essentially, I have printers that go "offline" and only come back into life if I disable SNMP per printer port and therefore lose any "real" status messages.

Some Environmental Information:

- The printers and the print server are on the same logical subnet

- There is no filtering/Firewall between the printers and the print server and not relevant given they are on the same logical subnet.

- The firewall is disabled on the Print Server

- The SNMP community string(s) configured on the printer matches that of the print server port

- The manufacturing model of the printer varies.  Various print vendor makes and models, of the 5-6 affected devices, all of them are different.

The following information relates to the newest printer a Ricoh Aficio MP C4501, manufactured and released in 2011 which is one of the models that has the issue

- The Printer's NIC firmware is up to date (applied myself as I work for this particular print vendor) and is fully compliant with SNMP V1, V2 and V3 and supports all relevant MIBs

- When the issue occurs, I can access the printer's web configuration page

- When the issue occurs, I can ping the printer device showing "offline" on the print server

- When the issue occurs, I can interrogate the printer device using an SNMP browser (many different types) on SNMP V1, V2 and V3 without issue

- When the issue occurs, I can monitor the device and get detailed status updates using SNMP V1, V2 and V3 in the print vendors own device management application as well as Spiceworks without issue

Note:

I am quite confident that there is not a communication issue with SNMP to/from the device.

I am quite confident that there is not an issue with the printers NIC in terms of firmware

I can get around this by disabling SNMP per port, but this is _NOT_ a fix because "actual" status' other than "online" are never reported.

Summary:

I'm going out on a limb here and suspecting that the root cause is not the device, firmware or print driver, but in fact something within Windows Server Print Subsystem.  To that end and given there has been a huge amount of discussion on this issue, is there any progress or even acknowledgement that this _MIGHT_ be a problem that Microsoft need to address?