Printers - New Way to install or has my brain died?

I have a MacBook Pro (4 gig, 10.5.5), my wife uses a MacBook (3 gig, 10.5.5)
Nothing sexist here - she travels more tan I do and likes the smaller model.

We both do a lot of work from home.

Home is Comcast cable into a Motorola Surfboard SBV5220 into a 500 gig Time Capsule. We have several printers, all hard wired ethernet networked, no USB; they happen to currently all be Brother printers. They work great on the Mac side, and used to work ok on the Windows XP side.

Yesterday I upgraded my MBP to Parallels 4.0 Build 4.0.3522.

There were minor problems (like my previous version on Windows XP Pro completely vanished - but since I only use it for non-critical "stuff" I was simply able to reinstall it) but when I tried to print - total failure.

I tried downloading the Brother drivers, I tried using the original CD's - no luck - everything I tried ended with a message that effectively stated:

"I can't find your printer on the network" from Windows XP.

Being a big fan of RTFM, I tried the Help. There is a well-written Help screen detailing exactly how to "Sharing a Mac Printer".

My point, or rather my questions are:

1. in previous versions of Parallels (3.0) I have always had to either have the original CD's with the printer drivers, or download them under Windows XP and install them. There is now in fact a bold, boxed warning message in the Help that says "Do not install the driver from the installation CD ....." Is this new? Have I been wasting my time downloading and installing the vendor supplied drivers?

2. It seems that the HP or Apple driver is all that is needed. But how do I select the printer that I want to use from within Windows XP? Let's say that I have a color inkjet, a B&W laser and a color Laser. How do I tell a print job (whether from Explorer or any other Windows application) which "real" printer I want to use?

3. I know that the "code" that goes to a printer varies as to whether the printer is Postscript, inkjet or emulation. How does Parallels "know" which is the real printer and produce the correct code?

A second question - the "mouse" problem - I don't have it - glad I don't have it, don't want it but would like to know why I don't have it.

And finally, does anyone have any idea of why my Windows machine disappeared when I upgraded to 4.0. As I mentioned, it was easy for me to simply reinstall - but - my wife uses Windows, Exchange Server, VPN, Blackberry sync a lot more than I do.

If her Windows machine disappeared (and yes I back up often with Time Machine, Super Duper to external FW drives, ChronoSync and others) I would not be alive to read the responses to this post.

Thank you for your assistance.