Only Random Border Lines Printing

I've been using Word and Excel 2003 Professional Edition for over a year now without any issues. I am very familiar with borders and how they work, how to turn them on and off for printing, etc.

One day about a month ago, both Word and Excel started exhibiting a strange (and extremely frustrating) behavior that has been reoccurring each and every time I try to print with borders:

Tables in Word and cells in Excel are both affected exactly the same. When I have border lines in a document, they all appear on screen and in preview. However when I print, random border lines will be missing. It is so random that I could print the same document three times in a row and different lines could be missing in each printout.

The missing lines can be horizontal or vertical, outer sections or inner sections, they can be the entire length/width of the table or span only one cell.

What I notice is that the most frequently missing lines are horizontal lines that span the entire width of the table. Perhaps about half of the lines will be missing most of the time.

Any advice as to how I might fix this perplexing problem?

Thanks for the reply!
Hum, it appears you are correct. I tried turning a file with borders into a PDF, that worked, it looks right in print preview, and printing off of a different printer and it worked!

Unfortunately, the printer that is messing my borders up in the main printer for the office and I can't continually use any other printer.

Any idea of what I can do to get it working properly again?

Well it looks like it was the printer driver. I installed a new driver and the random line issue is gone.

BUT, now the bottom border won't print! The file in question is only about 1/3 of the way down the page, so I know it's not simply a case of running out of room. argh!