I'm pretty sure this is an issue with how windows photoviewer handles the print job. We started experiencing issues printing large numbers of photos (jpg) with multiple photos per page (4) when we moved to windows 7.
The specifics of the issues had to do with the print job size. When printing those photos (4 per page) we saw the print job exploded to anywhere from 400MBs - 1GB+. Our current work around was to use Google Picasa which reduced the size of the print jobs, but it is still not great.
Hope this helps.