Just how remote is this printer? We get the same error ftping large
files with too many hops across an entirely too busy WAN. You can
twiddle time-outs for TCP in NMMGR, and there are some timing parms for
network printing in NPCONFIG to look at. Try pinging, and if you have a
workstation on the same segment as the HP, try a tracert, to see what
your response time is like. Is the connection heavily trafficked? Is
there much retransmission due to collisions?

Also, could there be anything funny about how your network handles SNMP,
such as a router or firewall that lets it go one way, but doesn't let it
come back? I would expect that were that the case, you would get other
spooler errors as well.

When we were running into NP problems, HPRC had us try some testing
utilities, and made some best guesses, the first and best of which was
exactly the problem: the remote site was filtering out SNMP traffic. The
remote site allowed it for us, and we were fine; point being, if you can
call them or forward this to ESC (recent discussion notwithstanding), do
so.